After recently earning acclaim for his wondrously transportive Il Buco (aka The Hole), one has the opportunity to see an early, newly restored feature from Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino. His 2003 debut feature Il Dono (aka The Gift) finds the director capturing the stunning Calabrian countryside and the few that remained in the village of Caulonia. Ahead of Kino Lorber’s theatrical release beginning July 25 at Metrograph, we’re pleased to exclusively premiere the new trailer and poster.
The film was restored in 4K in 2022 by courtesy of Coproduction Office and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata and Augustus Color laboratories, from the original camera and sound negatives, with Michelangelo Frammartino’s supervision.
Here’s the synopsis: “A gentle, beguiling hymn to a semi-deserted Calabrian countryside and those who stayed behind, Il Dono is a portrait of depopulation in the village of Caulonia (the filmmaker’s ancestral town), which saw a dramatic decrease in inhabitants from roughly 15,000 in the 1950s to just a few hundred people at the time of the film’s making. In mainly long, static, observational takes and with next to no dialogue, Il Dono pieces together the fragments of a place guided by slow rhythms and which could be described as ‘old world’ with traditions, rituals, charm aplenty, and not a few ruins from the relentless ravages of time. Gorgeously shot on 16mm (then transferred to 35mm, and presented here in a recent digital restoration of superlative color), each frame of Il Dono is like a painting, whether a landscape, portraits of great, weather-worn faces, or still lives reminiscent of Giorgio Morandi’s glass bottles.”
“I make feature-length films and I am not too concerned about defining what they are. It is clear that there is a component of ungovernability within my cinema, which generally is a feature that one attaches to documentary cinema,” the director told me back in 2022. “In general terms, popular opinion is that in fiction you have control over the actors, whereas in documentary filmmaking one does not have control because you’re shooting a film where life happens and you’re just filming it as it happens. So we can say that these two components coexist in most cinema and there is a great love for whatever cannot be governed. For me, that is the only way to allow life to enter the frame and my work with animals and with weather conditions that can be challenging. And the headlamps on cave explorers are the only source of lighting, so all of a sudden lighting is going to change with any small movement. So the perception of what we see changes––this for me is very, very important. And in this sense I do have a debt toward documentary filmmaking.”
See the exclusive trailer below.
