Features

Beautiful Things

Giorgio Ferrero
I 2017
93 min
V'18

A poetic documentary portrait, with hyper-stylised imagery and sound design, of four men who work, apparently, in complete isolation and silence. Van tends Texan oil pumpjacks, Danilo minds a huge cargo ship, Andrea works in an echo-less product-testing chamber, and Vito manages a waste-to-energy burning plant. They are contrasted with a modern couple who are typical, heedless consumers.
It has become a trend in contemporary documentary cinema to inquire into the strange “life cycle” of consumerist objects – especially at a time when cultural philosophy has turned its attention to the concept of the “anthropocene” or the measurable time-span of human impact on the earth’s natural systems, an epoch that may be approaching its apocalyptic end. Building audiovisual motifs that gradually interweave the daily sensations and musings of its lonely men, Ferrero eventually draws a much wider, global picture: a strange, disquieting, perverse economy of production, exhaustion, destruction and waste, a cycle that begins over and over again without reason or vision beyond immediate, ephemeral gratification. BEAUTIFUL THINGS looks for unexpected traces of soulfulness inside this infernal machine. (Adrian Martin)

In the presence of Giorgio Ferrero.

Credits
  • Van Quattro
  • Danilo Tribunal
  • Andrea Pavoni Belli
  • Vito Mirizzi
  • Vittoria de Ferrari Sapetto
  • Andrea Valfre
  • Giorgio Ferrero
  • Federico Biasin
  • Rodolfo Mongitore
  • Enrico Aleotti
  • Federico Biasin
  • Giorgio Ferrero
  • Filippo Vallegra
  • Giorgio Ferrero
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