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TARTARUGHE SUL DORSO
year 2004 length 92' coloure 35mm Country Italy
directed by Stefano Pasetto
First Feature Film
Cast Barbora Bobulova (she), Fabrizio Rongione (he), Gordana Miletic (aunt), Luigi Diberti (neighbohor), Vittorio Amandola (Antonio Manzini), Caterina Casini (1st colleague), Lucia Mascino (2nd colleague), Chiara Sani (Baker's daughter)
Screenplay Stefano Pasetto with Marina Fabbri, Carmelo Marabello
Cinematography Paolo Bravi
Editing Alessio Doglione
Art Direction Carlo Resigno
Costume Design Rosalia Guzzo
Music Banda Osiris
Producer Rosanna Seregni
Production Sintra
Italian Distrbution Istituto Luce
World rights
Sintra
Via Montebello, 99 - I-00185 Roma
Tel: +3906-4451256 Fax: +3906 444 0053
E-mail: sintra.prod@mclink.it
Press Office Maria Antonietta Curione
Istituto Luce
Tel +39 06 7299 2242 Fax +39 06 7221 127
stampa@luce.it
synopsis
A nameless love A boy and a girl who, just like many others, hold onto the eternal flame. A story of the “first images” which remain impressed upon our memories of someone who passes through our lives. “He” and “She” are thirty-year-olds living in Trieste. In the visitor’s room of a prison, over games of Scrabble, they reconstruct the series of missed encounters which have punctuated their mutual past. The words that appear on the game board open chapters which tell us their story. All their lives they have brushed by each other, each one ignorant of the presence of the other. Only a turtle, a token of their adolescent love, ties them together.
They meet again in an operating room; He is the patient and She is the surgeon.
As they begin to spend time together, photographs and interrupted phrases reappear which bring back memories of a shared childhood. After painstaking consideration, when She decides that her love lies with him, He turns her away preferring to hide himself in the dream which they have been cultivating all their lives.
When She is attached by a dock worker, He reacts with his usual aggressiveness. The Scrabble game in the visitor’s room is now over. She closes the game and leaves. And what is waiting for her on the outside?
director's statement
Tartarughe sul dorso is a story about being obsessed with memory, about something that grows such deep roots that it can’t be scratched away, about when the childhood ideal of a love clashes with real flesh and blood men and women.
The narrative idea at the base of this film was the attempt to contradict the melodrama leaving openings and phase displacements in the internal circles of the events. The words remain unspoken. The glances are sideways. The gestures are out of time and place.
The “first image” I had of the film was the head of a blonde woman who I felt I knew, and had known perhaps since childhood but whose face I was unable to see. It was like some mythological restraint. A series of images followed this; images linked to a bitingly cold wind whiping through ports and hair alike, to the vivid and intense colours of skin which has been reddened by the cold and to the reefs which are beaten by the waves of the sea. That is how we ended up in Trieste.
Stefano Pasetto
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