August 17, 9:30 pm
Martin Eden, 2019, Italy, France, 129 min. Director Pietro Marcello. Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice Film Festival. Special screening as a part of New Holland Island International Debut Film Festival
A young sailor decides to get an education and become a writer for the love of a girl who is out of his league. His willpower and individualism help him to overcome the circumstances of his birth, but they do not bring him happiness. A rising star director of European cinema, Pietro Marcello turns to the prose of Jack London in his first fully fictional film (he has already made several documentaries and semidocumentaries), here transferring the action from the Oregon of a century ago to mid-20th century Naples. The exact chronology is deliberately vague, obscured among other things by the use of impressionistic, anachronistic musical selections, and non-diegetic poetic inserts of archival footage. Marcello draws on the imagery and technology of the last century (Martin Eden was shot on film), but his latest work doesn’t amount to rejection of modernity. The film’s political scope resonates unexpectedly with the present day, and Marcello’s attention to the colours and textures of the 20th century represents less a return to the past than a journey “back to the things themselves”.
The film is shown in the original language with Russian subtitles and wireless headphones.
Please register in advance (link in Russian).
New Holland Island International Debut Film Festival is a platform for new and daring cinema, whose mission is to support original and distinctive creative statements and inscribe new names into the international context. The festival is organised by the team of the New Holland: Cultural Urbanization project.
