Giuseppe Boccassini
DESIRE
Germany, France, Italy, 2025, 30’
At the presence of the director
Desire is a non-chronological timeline collage based on a corpus of footage from melodrama. The decoupage-based work covers roughly thirty years, from 1932 to 1958. It includes American, Argentinian, British, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Mexican and Spanish titles. The film follows a diachronic and synchronic path, intertwining film history over a determined period and in timeless moments. It emphasises that although history changes in space and time, human gestures remain the same. This sense of constant repetition is a desperate way to escape the human condition, which is oppressed by the passing of time. The film addresses the impossibility of achieving total liberation from the archive, even when memory is reduced to ash, wandering on the threshold between presence and absence, amidst desire.
Giuseppe Boccassini is a film-maker based between Berlin and Italy. After graduating in Film Theory at DAMS, University of Bologna, and completing a diploma in Film Directing at NUCT Cinecittà in Rome, he developed a body of research focused on found footage, archival practices, and experimental cinema. In recent years, his work has delved into the historical and theoretical exploration of film noir and melodrama. Since 2017, he has been the director of FRACTO – Experimental Film Encounter, a festival dedicated to experimental cinema held at ACUD Kunsthaus in Berlin.
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