Beautiful Things

Showings

New People Cinema Fri, Jun 8, 2018 7:00 PM
Roxie Theatre Sat, Jun 9, 2018 2:45 PM
Film Info
Director:Giorgio Ferrero
Film Category:Music
Art
Experimental
Running Time:93 min.
Country:Italy
Year of Release:2018
Premiere:West Coast Premiere

Description

A symphonic journey into our obsessive consumption and spectacularly shot, Beautiful Things is a journey of words, sounds and geometries in which to get lost. A virtual-reality experience allowing viewers to immerse themselves in worlds to which it would be hard for them ever to have access in their own lives.

An oil field in Texas, the engine room of an ocean-going freighter; an immense anechoic chamber in Switzerland - these places are at the root of our daily existence because the objects which we love to fill our lives with begin and end their journey in just these isolated and unfamiliar worlds, through a process of creation, transport, validation and destruction. The protagonists of the film lead solitary and silent existences, remote from our own lifestyle, but their confessions make us feel part of a single design.

Van is a floor hand, the maintenance man on an oilrig. He works in the desert, at a large oilfield in Texas. Danilo is the chief engineer of a freighter. He spends all his days in the heart of the vessel where a humongous engine resides. Andrea is a scientist. He has lived his whole life between mathematical formulae and the silence of the anechoic chamber. Vito has spent half of his life looking after slot machines. Today he is in charge of an immense reinforced-concrete pit for waste. These men, unwittingly, provide the basis for the whole sequence of creation, transport, marketing and destruction of the objects that feed our bulimic lifestyle.

The objects that we think we need every day begin and end their journey inside isolated and eerie industrial and scientific locations. These men are monks in temples of steel and concrete and carry out the same mechanical rituals every day in silence and solitude, sharing the space with their own phantoms.

Beautiful Things is a trip of words, sounds and geometries where you can lose yourself and breath into unknown and distant worlds.

Director’s Statement

This movie is dedicated to ourselves who could not endure a life without collecting useless objects, to us, bulimic of plastics and noises and afraid of silence. It’s dedicated to ourselves who fall asleep with Netflix in our ears hoping that night might fall without notice, to us, who accept the idea that life can go before but not that objects can survive us. This film is a way of dispelling our lifestyle from which we cannot escape in any way.

Beautiful Things is a journey into our consumption ‘bulimia’. The many objects we accumulate and we believe to be essential begin their production cycle in silent secluded industrial and scientific sites.

Van, Danilo, Andrea and Vito are monks inside temples of send, steel and concrete. They repeat the same liturgy every day. We don’t even know that they exist. Van, Danilo, Andrea and Vito for the first time will be able to meet and look virtually in the face of the audience to whom they have devoted a whole life of work.

The film was written and directed with a musical approach, like a score where notes and images are conceived together. Words, music, sounds are part of the same language and carry a single symphonic tale The very short slice of daily life that opens every act is the photograph of our life, our home, our terrace, our objects, our melancholy.

This film is a way of escaping a lifestyle from which we can find no way out. In the film we have tried to express all our sadness, the urgency of the need to go back to breathing in silence, free from the constriction of a life swallowed up by noise.

This is our howl and we have tried to turn it into a song.