In an interview with the “world”, the Italian filmmaker, whose third feature film traces the discovery, in 1961, of the gulf of the bifurto, one of the deepest in the world, dates back to the origins of this project.
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Michelango Frammartino, 54 -year -old Italian director, practices an art in the reverse of the mainly anthropocentric cinema. After filming the cycle of organic life in the Quattro Volte (2010), he built his latest film around a deep crevasse of Calabria, which reverses the perception of space-time.
During the ten years that separate your previous film from “Il Buco”, what had you become?
This film asked for no less than five years of work. And, when you work with reality as a raw material, it always takes more time than expected. The fact of not mastering things always creates unexpected. Before that, a project grabbed me for three years, without succeeding. Apart from films, teaching occupies an important part of my life. Besides, I am very sporty: I do bicycle, I swim, I run. My passion for the landscape and the territory comes from there. When I was a teenager, I thought I would become a professional cyclist, a sport that is practiced on roads, on montages. It is found in my films.
How did you discover the bifurto chasm?
I knew the territory of the Pollino well, a massif in the south of the Apennines, between the basilicate and the calabre, which I discovered at the end of the filming of the Quattro Volte. Speleologists among my knowledge have taught me the existence of this chasm, the deepest of Italy, as of a dimension below reality. The discovery, by accompanying them, of this submerged part of the landscape has aroused in me a lively curiosity.
How do you write such a film, without dialogue, which focuses on the exploration of a space underground?
For me, writing consists above all in a harvest of documentation materials – drawings, images, archives, sketches. The work of Giovanna Giuliani, my coscenarist, was to descend herself into the cave. And then, too, to seek in the speleology camps the people who were going to become the actors of the film. But the only character, in the classic sense of the term, is the cave.
Why enroll the film in the past and trace the pioneer expedition, which dates back to the years 1961-1962?
This is roughly the period in which my father left Calabria for Milan, as millions of Italians left the South for the North. It is a story that still concerns us today, since Italy is always divided in two and that we continue to emigrate, not only to work, but also to study, train or treat himself. And which concerns me too, born in Milan but of Calabraise origin, and therefore always a little divided in half.
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