(...) A work of great aesthetic maturity. Stefano Tomassini | Artribune

The sky, the sun, the moon, houses at dusk, feet framed as they pass again and again in front of the same doors, a weeping woman, collective dances: all animate from within a landscape as beautiful as it is far removed from mannered aestheticism—a montage born of the narrative body. Francesca Pedroni | Il Manifesto

It’s a masterful work, structured both as a wordless dance film and as a narrative feature inspired by Os Pobres, the novel by Raul Brandão. It evokes feelings of exile, loss, decay, remembrance, nostalgia and even humour. Dance theatre is performed with emotional intensity, recalling Pina Bausch’s sensibility. The photographs and images are composed with great artistic finesse, resulting in what is unmistakably a large-scale Italian cinematic classic. The Jury | RIFF Festival Norway 2022

(...) Of all 29 films, the highlight of this year’s PDFF is the Italian film Elegy of Lost Things, a stunning 48-minute artwork depicting life in a rural town. Inspired by Portuguese author Raul Brandão’s novel Os Pobres (The Poor), director Stefano Mazzotta delivers a portrait of morality, estrangement, socio-political reflection and realism. The 48-minute film unfolds like an arthouse feature and features remarkable performances in both dance and acting. The choreography is as beautifully subtle and asymmetrical as the framing and colour palette, which cast a realistic, sun-bleached haze over this quietly compelling story. Elegy of Lost Things is impeccable in its versatility. Amy Leona Havin | Oregon ArtsWatch

(…) A slow and painful dance. The dream of a madman. The delirium of a clown. The disjointed grief of a woman dressed in black. Figures with mechanical movements, their gaze absent like Kantor’s characters, forever poised on the ridge between life and death. (…) Stefano Mazzotta—trained at Koreja and Paolo Grassi—multimedia artist in close dialogue with “Third Theatre”, interweaves dance, literature, photography and visual arts. He finds the pharmakon in the wound itself. The dancers assimilate their own death when they become conscious of it. They overcome it through the shared dimension that comforts pain. They give shape to a collective dance in which magic and madness coexist. A shipwreck in an ancestral South. A journey recalling Miracle in Milan, but also the dream of a madman in Train de vie.* Vincenzo Sardelli | KLP

SYNOPSIS

I am nothing.I shall never be anything.I cannot wish to be anything.Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.Fernando Pessoa

A rugged, dusty Sardinia. A dance as rocky as the mountains, as bare as the dry branches of trees and the shrubs scorched by dazzling sunlight. Time wears away at architecture and depopulates villages. It scratches the walls, from which yellowed plaster falls away. It strips doors and window frames. Time is dust. It gathers in empty houses. It settles on objects, fossilising them. Time is a stone in an old man’s hands, smoothed by the elements. (...)

The crackle of footsteps. The rustle of shoes over paving stones. The dry thud of earth turned by a spade. The warm vibration of guitar strings. The enveloping scrape of a bow across viola and violin strings. A slow and painful dance. The dream of a madman. The delirium of a clown. The disjointed grief of a woman dressed in black. Figures with mechanical movements, their gaze absent like Kantor’s characters, forever poised on the ridge between life and death. Weeping. A mute nostalgia that emerges through the body, in stiffened choreographies made of spasms and syncopations.

Sardinia’s Nuragic landscape becomes an arid, abandoned horizon. In this land of desolate souls, the camera remains still. It offers us a photographic novel in tableaux. The colour palette is muted. Long and very long shots stand out against a dramatic horizon, all the more unsettling for its contrast with the brightness of this Mediterranean, rocky, prehistoric South. The camera’s steady, frontal gaze explores the colours while leaving their mystery intact. The sea at five in the morning. The forceful wind of a parched Ferragosto.

These creatures belong to death. They sense their own decomposition, yet cannot rationalise it. They find no rest. A sense of exile permeates the choreographies of disconnected, unresolved characters, who discover a notion of closeness and community through contact with water: a synonym for drowning, an allegory of shipwreck, an invitation to cross over, a symbol of rebirth. The sea makes life and death one. It sets in motion the resurrection of bodies as still as the camera frames, after a last supper in which food, too, becomes a celebration of absence.

Ancient costumes and objects. Everything is fixed: grief, gazes, memories, dance. Lost and exiled women. Disarticulated, fragmented men. Each has a mourning to work through. They grieve for things, for people, for themselves. They are zombies in the half-light. They celebrate their own funeral before digging their own graves with their bare hands.

Stefano Mazzotta—trained at Koreja and Paolo Grassi—multimedia artist in close dialogue with “Third Theatre”, interweaves dance, literature, photography and visual arts. He finds the pharmakon in the wound itself. The dancers assimilate their own death when they become conscious of it. They overcome it through the shared dimension that comforts pain. They give shape to a collective dance in which magic and madness coexist. A shipwreck in an ancestral South. A journey recalling Miracle in Milan, but also the dream of a madman in Train de vie. Sweeping human and natural landscapes worthy of Isabel Allende. Faces marked by the wear of life. Close-ups and panoramas reminiscent of Sergio Leone.

Shostakovich’s overused Waltz No. 2 sets in motion an angular collective dance, made all the more evocative by being filmed from above: flared, never in time with the music. And it is precisely in the dynamism it generates that the redemption of this rural, wild South—resistant to tourist itineraries—begins to emerge, like a phoenix ready to rise from its ashes. A hymn to life that does not deny death.

“Elegy of Lost Things is a river of tears, cries and mystery. The cloudy wave lays bare the deepest roots. The torrent carries misfortune and laughter; unceasingly, it draws this human land towards a shore where the worn hands of those who have suffered finally find the hand that supports them. Where the eyes of the poor, weary of weeping, marvel at the eternal dawn, where dreams become reality.”

From a review by Vincenzo Sardelli for KLP

GENESIS

Inspired by Os Pobres, the stark and painful novel by Portuguese writer and historian Raul Brandão, Elegy of Lost Things is a multifaceted choreographic project developed by Zerogrammi over a three-year artistic process in Sardinia, as a guest of the residency programme Artists in the Territories / Interconnections.

Throughout the complex creative journey that led to the work, the company followed a working method refined over many years: investigating territories, contexts and diverse languages, while building a living archive of materials and testimonies. This archive nourished the dancing body with signs and inspirations drawn not only from dance, but also from other vocabularies—visual arts, video, photography and literature—and from an experience of the world grounded in a relationship with places and people beyond conventional theatre settings.

The project has generated four distinct yet interconnected forms: an award-winning medium-length film, a stage performance, a photographic book featuring an original text by Eugenio Barba, and finally a community project which, accompanying the presentation of the performance, continues and expands its dialogue with ever new territories and communities.

REFERENCES

In an exceedingly bleak world, made up essentially of resignation and discomfort, unresolved existential questions and extreme deprivation, the characters in Brandão’s novel—confined within the deepest poverty like prisoners in the gaol that life itself appears to be—stage a slow procession of bitter reflections. From these, they ultimately draw a general law governing the transient course of humankind: the living have no purpose other than to die and eventually become humus, fertiliser to nourish worms and the Earth, which nevertheless continues to turn.

Written in Portugal at the beginning of the twentieth century—a nation confronting the inevitable failure of its colonial project, the consequences of increasing internal impoverishment and the collapse of the grand schemes of modern urbanisation—The Poor is a stark and painful novel that leaves no room for sentimentality or dreams of salvation. Human beings are damned, above all the poor, the most destitute; they inhabit the darkness outside, beneath an open sky that weighs like a lid, and the darkness within, in each person’s soul.

Let life follow its splendid course. It tastes of dream and iron. It is tenderness, misfortune, despair. It takes us, drags us, pushes us, fills us with illusion, scatters us to every corner of the globe. It bruises us. It lifts us up. It stuns us. It shelters us. It soaks us in the same vortex of mud. It kills us. Yet, even if only for a moment, it compels us to look upward, and until the end we remain with our eyes dazed. Raul Brandão