Animaphix presents the Sicilian premiere of “Invelle” by Simone Massi. The screening will be introduced by performer and cuntastorie Mimmo Cuticchio with the live performance “Il Cunto.”
After its world premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti section, where it received the Carlo Lizzani Award, participation in Alice nella Città and an intense festival run, comes – Tuesday, July 23, 10 p.m. – the Sicilian premiere, at the 10th edition of Animaphix Film Festival, of the long-awaited feature film by award-winning animation director Simone Massi, Invelle, produced by Minimum Fax and distributed by Lucky Red, due out in theaters next August 29.
The screening will be preceded, at 9 p.m., by the live performance “Il Cunto” by Palermo-born cuntastorie (or cuntista) Mimmo Cuticchio – among the film’s performers – where the tale is entrusted to memory and to a metrical scansion, body gestures and facial expressions that transcend the textuality of the tale and are inscribed in the ephemeral art of the spectacle. Invelle, in Marche dialect “nowhere, nowhere,” punctuates three pivotal moments of passage in twentieth-century Italy, from Fascist and Nazi oppression to workers’ struggles, through a poignant family tale of rare political power and aesthetic effectiveness. A lyrical ode to the peasant and resistant world, it moves between traditional drawing and rotoscoping. The voices of Marco Baliani, Ascanio Celestini, Luigi Lo Cascio, Neri Marcorè, Giovanna Marini, Toni Servillo, and Filippo Timi, in addition to the aforementioned Mimmo Cuticchio, will narrate the forty thousand hand-drawn frames one by one. An evening, then, dedicated to the telling of memory through the ancient art of the cunto and the contemporary animated cinema of the Marche artist who, since his first short films, has made oral memory one of his most powerful tools for interpreting History, precisely through “the stories” told and seen through the simple and true eye of the people.
“In the piece of land where I was born and raised there is nothing important to see and remember, nothing that could be considered worthy of ending up in books. A kind of ‘Invelle,’ a non-place from which History with a capital letter took and demanded everything it wanted and could. In return we got the lowercase stories, the ones that you either pass on verbally or they are lost.”
Simone Massi. A former factory worker who later trained at the Urbino School of the Book, Simone Massi has created and directed animations selected in festivals in 75 countries around the world. Winner of more than 300 awards, including a David di Donatello, three Nastri d’Argento, a Flaiano Award for the animation created within the documentary “La strada dei Samouni,” Premio Oeil d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
Animaphix – Nuovi Linguaggi Contemporanei Film Festival is made possible thanks to the contribution and patronage of the Ministry of Culture – General Directorate for Cinema and Audiovisual; the Sicilia Film Commission – which operates within the Department of Tourism, Sports and Entertainment of the Sicilian Region; and the Municipality of Bagheria. With the support of the Regional Agency for Environmental Protection of Sicily (Arpa Sicilia), the Arts and Humanities Council of the Quebéc Ministry of Culture and Communications, the Quebéc Delegation in Rome, the Instituto Cervantes in Palermo, the Embassy of the Czech Republic, the Czech Center in Rome, and the Polish Institute in Rome.