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- Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
- Frente a Guernica (versione integrale)
RYUICHI SAKAMOTO | OPUS
Out of competition
Japan 2022, Director Neo Sora Production KAB Inc., Recorded Picture Company Distribuzione Film Constellation running time 103’
On March 28, 2023, legendary composer Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away at only 71 after a long battle with cancer. Because of his illness, Sakamoto could no longer perform live on stage in the last years of his career. Nevertheless, in 2022, he gathered all his energy to leave one final performance in the form of a film concert directed by his son Neo Sora, who filmed this sublime and heartbreaking performance. Sakamoto, for the occasion, carefully chose the twenty tracks with which he wanted to cover his entire career: from his techno-pop period with the Yellow Magic Orchestra to his magnificent soundtracks, among which those for Bertolucci’s films shine to the meditative music of 12, his last album, a true artistic testament and summa of his art. RYUICHI SAKAMOTO | OPUS is one of the rare examples of a work where an artist manages to bring his entire creation to a definitive conclusion when close to death. Sakamoto’s effort is reminiscent of the achievement of his colleague and friend David Bowie, who recorded the splendid and sorrowful album Blackstar in the last days of his life. Bowie and Sakamoto shared the set as actors in 1983 in the unforgettable Nagisa Ôshima’s Furyo.
Neo Sora, son of Sakamoto and his third wife Norika Sora, is a filmmaker, cinematographer, and artist who, in 2015, directed the documentary Ainu Neno An Ainu together with the art collective Lunch Bee House, of which he is a member. An installation version of that film was presented at the Tokyo Institute of Culture in 2017. In 2020, he made the short film The Chickens, screened at festivals such as Locarno, Clermont-Ferrand and Hong Kong. His latest project is the short Sugar Glass Bottle (2022).
Oscar Cosulich
FRENTE A GUERNICA (UNABRIDGED VERSION)
Out of competition
Italy, 2023, Director Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Narrated voices Yervant Gianikian, Lucrezia Lerro, Running time 126′
The version showing at the 80th Venice International Film Festival will be a sort of “Director’s Cut” – as director Alberto Barbera said – of the montage film commissioned by Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia from Armenian-born director and architect Yervant Gianikian. Who “co-signed” this Frente a Guernica with his wife Angela Ricci Lucchi (an artist who passed away in 2018 at the age of 75), at his side in the many installations exhibited in the past from the Centre Pompidou to the MoMA in New York as in the conception of what it would be reductive to call an additional content of the Spanish museum’s collection related to the immortal painting by Pablo Picasso exhibited there.
A work “in front” of which the two felt an urge to present it differently, departing from Robert Flaherty’s 1946 film of the same name and taking advantage of Lucrezia Lerro’s voice, which recounts the Osip Mandel’štam “case” while Gianikian himself reads from Mikhail Koltsov’s diary. A longer version than the “official” one that continues-as promised by the director to his wife-their “political, artistic, historical work on the violence of the twentieth century,” and which, through the effects of the Nazi and fascist bombing of the town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, also offers an opportunity to reflect on our present. “It was tremendous to work on war while another war is going on,” Gianikian declares. – Ours is a film against nuclear madness; Picasso foresaw it with Guernica.”
Mattia Pasquini
