BERLIN - A film that is sung, from the opening credits. A journey through the regions of Italy as Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio explore an alternative popular culture: polyvocal songs, musical ethnology and oral traditions. Previewing at the Berlinale (Forum section) is the documentary Canone effimero, made with the support of the Film Commission Torino Piemonte, produced by Alessandro Borrelli for La Sarraz Pictures, with contributions from DGCA – MIC and support from the Film Commission Torino Piemonte - Piemonte Doc Film Fund. The lyrical documentary expresses a deep bond with nature and territory, bringing local stories with universal scope to the big screen. It recounts a journey of discovery through an underground, invisible Italy, far from current narratives. The characters on this journey are individuals or small remote communities; whether the gestures of solitary builders of ancient instruments or the voices that sing the polyvocal music of the past, they are all fighting the extinction of their symbolic horizons. These are the signs of a cultural resistance, intent on the survival of an Italian hinterland of faces, voices and stories.
The polyvocal female arbëreshë songs of the Lucanian Pollino, the hypnotic litanies of the Nebrodi mountains in Sicily, the incredible polyphonic vocal technique of Ceriana in the Ligurian hinterland, and solitary holdouts in Le Marche, popular songs of love and struggle. These are the sounds and stories that constitute the backbone and atmosphere of this epic and fragmented journey that explores the polyvocal traditions from forgotten areas, the construction of ancient instruments and the use of so-called ephemeral instruments, language ??with its roots deep in popular culture.
Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio: “The Italian hinterland is made of faces, voices, ancient stories and daily practices that form a network of echoes and assonances. Faces and bodies, hands, work tools, family photographs, whispered voices: up close these are fragments of personal and collective stories, loves and abandonments, journeys and returns. Mixing performance and autobiography, the protagonists of Canone Effimero bear witness to living cultures and to vocal and musical techniques that have been codified over time through oral traditions. Looking for the points of connection and internal references, one glimpses a self-portrait of a submerged yet vital landscape. This picture is framed by the artisan gestures passed down from master to student, together with an ethereal spiritual horizon: the making of ancient and mysterious instruments, such as the Calabrian lyre or the medieval organistrum, reflects a direct extension of the spirit of nature or the celestial order, its intermediary with the human”.