zio palmiro

UNCLE PALMIRO – Golden teeth, nihilism and gamble

#FILM

Uncle Palmiro by Luca Sorgato (2022)

A sardonic black and white invested with sonorities as tragicomic as the images. This is the framework in which the director conducts his personal aesthetic research inspired by the poetry of Attilio Lolini: a futile and desecrating nihilism as a mirror and representation of reality.

That of “Uncle Palmiro” is a hermetic scenery meticulously set up with symbols, objects-fetishes, human relics and furnishings (gold and ceramic teeth, old photographs, antiques found by the director among the stalls of junk dealers and scrap dealers). A cinema, his, devoted to the construction of a surreal completely within the frame, which only occasionally allows a glimpse of the underlying plan: the apparent chaos that informs the game – Antonello’s gambling game and the film’s provocative one – is in truth a constructed layering of meanings and readings.

The algebraic analysis of the “natural” cycle of capitalist life: earning to survive and surviving by earning. The human race for currency as a compromise for the preservation of existential quiet.

– Francesco A. Dubini

 

Did you enjoy the article? To learn about our 2023 selection, visit our Ten Shorts Around the World page!