By Piero Di Bucchianico
Music never ends. The launch of the eighth edition of Seeyousound International Music Film Festival was already aiming to signal, with this tag-line, the idea of extending the power unleashed by music.
The waves of an eight that spreads its waves from an infinitesimal perspective can reach not only the places designated to celebrate it in all its connotations, but also that temporal dimension that over the last two years we have all perceived as altered: compressions, dilations, abrupt stops, hopeful resumptions of activities and habits, then once again repeated and draining stand-bys waiting for a normality to be found again, reconquered and renewed.
Luoghi, si diceva: there was no choice but to start again from the halls of Cinema Massimo, which welcome Seeyousound back with the unchanged aura that sets them apart, but also with the tangible possibility of crossing paths with faces, catching reactions, and being enveloped in the comings and goings of bodies that, from the very set-up of the event, prove palpable with that anxiety mixed with adrenaline that makes everything come together, in the constant wait before the prima.
Times: this wait for Seeyousound has been even longer and began 725 days ago, in February 2020, coinciding with the last screening of the sixth edition before the looming pandemic crisis, which cut short a very promising festival in its infancy.
It then continued with the move online for Seeyousound7 and culminated in last night, 18 February 2022, the date on which the festival could finally reunite with the warmth and reactions of its loyal audience.
The opening words of Carlo Griseri and Alessandro Battaglini, director and deputy director of Seeyousound, do not hide the emotion of finding themselves once again in a packed Sala Cabiria and in an opening night that went beyond the best expectations, recording the tutto esaurito e offrendo al proprio pubblico un’esperienza differenziata e dalle duplici emozioni.
Stuf by Titus Meszaros is the silent short film designated to offer the musical fabric of Ginevra Nervi the right visual context in which to perform the live score. Otto minuti molto intensi, recovered from the archives of a cinema that has emerged strongly in the eyes of the most attentive cinephiles in recent decades, but which nonetheless demonstrate that its roots were planted much earlier.
Una perla nascosta, riscoperta e ri-valorizzata by the contemporaneity of a young artist whose performance demonstrates, also thanks to the spotlight afforded by the responsibility of such a heartfelt inauguration, how Seeyousound's choice to create autonomous spaces for live scores within the programme is well aware of the trends and needs of today's cinematic and musical experience.
Ginevra Nervi was also presented with the Premio Meno di Trenta – Seeyousound, for the first time also open to the most talented musicians under 30 with a “great future”.
But first, a greeting from the director Stephen Kijak (special guest of Seeyousound 8), after which the audience in Sala Cabiria was able to dive into the journey into the past of Shoplifters of the World, un film dalle caratteristiche appropriate ad un’apertura comprensibilmente tesa in direzione generalista.
The film proved enjoyable both for those nostalgic for the era when the Smiths were one of the most fashionable bands on the planet (the director himself swears he sees many of them in the audience, he only needs to glimpse their look), but also for younger faces, present as well, who may have been able to discover the deeds of a band fundamental to the 1980s precisely thanks to the film's protagonists and a soundtrack made up of the band's songs, long sought after and never granted to any film before now.
In 1987 Denver, a group of young people obsessed (in the positive sense of the term, if there is one) with the band led by Morrissey, played by Ellar Coltrane (if you have wondered where you have seen him before, it is him: the boy from Boyhood), Helena Howard and James Bloor (also present in the audience), find themselves having to come to terms with the break-up of their favourite band, an arduous test of survival and a warning ahead of adulthood for a generation squeezed by changing times, shifting tastes and the existential turmoil that only those lyrics and those notes can reflect.
Through the Smiths, the film tries to extend its range to the decade in which it is set, incorporating a referential register that ranges across music and cinema and adheres sentimentally, as is obvious in this context, to post-punk< and new wave (Kijak is even careful to pay homage to Liquid Sky, an expressionist, sci-fi punk cult film of the ’80s).
However, there is also a careful sketch of opposing tendencies, perhaps mistreated for comic effect, but to which the figure of the metal DJ (Joe Manganiello) lends humanity, forced as he is by circumstances to understand the protagonists' emotions and to empathise with them.
The end of the screening, however, does not mark the end of Seeyousound's first evening, which can continue afterwards at Blah Blah, once the doors of Cinema Massimo have closed in preparation for the next day, but the desire to socialise, exchange opinions on the film and, why not, dance to the very same songs glorified by the film's protagonists is still there.
The night is deep, but the Seeyousound DAY2 is already looming with its packed programme; all that remains is for us to meet again in the cinema!
