Desert Suite

In Fabrizio Ferraro’s DESERT SUITE, a young man travels through Europe. In Brussels, he meets a woman. Like him, she is a solitary soul who hasn’t yet found her place in life. The film presents us with a series of atmospheric vignettes enwrapped in moody visuals. The images are often distorted, blurry, painterly—creating a vaporous sense of dreamy unreality. The encounters evoke profound feelings of longing and existential discontent. DESERT SUITE constructs a fragile mystery about unrooted individuals at the mercy of a world in flux. Bodies and spaces are at the very centre of the film. Ferraro captures their relationship between them in scenes that unfold slowly and poetically. Instead of following a conventional narrative, we drift along with the characters, travelling from undulating vineyards to cities of iron and glass, from a park where the light dances between the greenery to canals and skyscrapers. In an anonymous room (sometimes shot in black and white), the couple watches images of global catastrophes on a laptop. DESERT SUITE captures a hazy, yet pervasive sense of meandering. In this regard, the film evokes Homer’s The Odyssey—but, in Ferraro’s contemporary journey, the very ideas of home and purpose seem like a mirage. (Cristina Álvarez López) 

In the presence of Fabrizio Ferraro and Ottavia Fragnito.

 Fabrizio Ferraro: TETRALOGIA DI FILM-STUDIO SULL’AMATORIALITÀ (2006-2008), JE SUIS SIMONE – LA CONDITION OUVRIÈRE (2009), PIANO SUL PIANETA – MALGRADO TUTTO, CORAGGIO FRANCESCO! (2010),PENULTIMO PAESAGGIO (2011), QUATTRO NOTTI DI UNO STRANIERO (2013), QUANDO DAL CIELO (2015), SEBASTIAN 0 (2016), COLOSSALE SENTIMENTO (2016), GLI INDESIDERATI D’EUROPA (2017), CHECKPOINT BERLIN (2020), LA VER-DUTA LUMINOSA (2021), I MORTI RIMANGONO CON LA BOCCA APERTA (2022)