Life Left Behind

Between 9 May and 11 June 1943, the island of Pantelleria was violently bombarded by the Allied troops to reconquer Italian soil. Residents recall that, after the surrender, some of the buildings were blown up for the cameras of a propaganda combat film. Pantelleria traces the memories of this event in the local collective consciousness and looks at the contemporary implications of an episode that took place in the shadow of official history. Through a two-years long participatory process with the residents, the film explores the tension between the truth and its ideological distortion, between the reality of the bombs and their telling through images. The Nervi hangar, a symbol of Mussolini’s militarisation of the island, is now shown empty and inhabited by a magical animal presence. Extracts from the combat film are projected onto the buildings of today’s Pantelleria, while the camera travels through the bunkers dug by the Italian army. The voiceover, written and read by writer Giorgio Vasta, gives expressive form to the island’s stories, while the sound by GUP Alcaro and Davide Tomat distorts the recordings of the local orchestra Spata. In the liberating final dance scene, there is room for the reactivation of the past and redemption in the present.

Prehistoric women dragged by their hair by cavemen; a stereotype often wrongly presented as historical, Ludivine Large-Bessette imagines a new account of this myth. As if to undo it or to follow it up, she creates a series of chapters with hair trapped in omniscient hands. By introducing strategies of deliverance, articulating the expression of sisterhood, and choreographing bodies in resilience without tricks, she opens up the possibility of new collective horizons.

A sports team trains in a dim and vast space. Bodies collide, support each other or collapse collectively. The sound of them screaming, moving, breathing, falling - everything merges into one and the same organism. This plural body is frail and shapeless, disciplined and supportive altogether.