Il Dono
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(Michelangelo Frammartino, 2003, Italy, 81 minutes)
New 4K restoration!
The first film from the decidedly unprolific Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino, whose only other features are 2010’s incredible Le Quattro Volte and 2021’s Il buco (a hit here at the Webster Film Series when we ran it in July 2022), 2003’s Il Dono (“The Gift”) has been newly restored, after having been shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm, and is finally getting the U.S. release it deserves. In this virtually dialogue-free film, we largely follow an old man with a terrific, weather-worn face as he goes about his daily rituals in Frammartino’s ancestral village of Caulonia (which had a population of 15,000 in the 1950s but was down to just a couple hundred by the time the film was shot). Frammartino has an unusual approach to slow cinema, full of gorgeously composed long takes, and it pays off with one of the best final sequences you’re likely to see this year.
In Italian, left deliberately unsubtitled.
New 4K restoration!
The first film from the decidedly unprolific Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino, whose only other features are 2010’s incredible Le Quattro Volte and 2021’s Il buco (a hit here at the Webster Film Series when we ran it in July 2022), 2003’s Il Dono (“The Gift”) has been newly restored, after having been shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm, and is finally getting the U.S. release it deserves. In this virtually dialogue-free film, we largely follow an old man with a terrific, weather-worn face as he goes about his daily rituals in Frammartino’s ancestral village of Caulonia (which had a population of 15,000 in the 1950s but was down to just a couple hundred by the time the film was shot). Frammartino has an unusual approach to slow cinema, full of gorgeously composed long takes, and it pays off with one of the best final sequences you’re likely to see this year.
In Italian, left deliberately unsubtitled.
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