Sicilia! (35mm OmU)

In the organizer's words:

Director: Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Germany/ France/ Italy 1999, 66 minutes, 35mm, original Italian version with German subtitles

The shots of the orange pickers next to the basket of unsold fruit are reminiscent of Tina Modotti, of Walker Evans, that is, of the great social photography of the twenties and thirties. And after these first images, the traveler from the north or from America, who visits his mother after years of absence, boards the train, and the film travels into the heart of Sicily, which could just as well be the heart of Germany or Persia, but is definitely our heart.

Sicilia! is a condensation, not an abridgment, of a novel by Elio Vittorini from the late 1930s.
in which he dreamily, yet laconically and humorously describes his return to Sicily. Straub/Huillet follow their monolithic life project, conceiving their actors in a Brechtian sense as reciting bodies that call out rhythmically composed dialogues to each other. Unrivalled: the almost Dadaist sequence of dialogues between the traveller and the local scissor grinder, who does not grind scissors.

In the supporting program: À propos de Nice
Director: Jean Vigo
France 1930, 24 minutes, 35mm, silent

Blue Salon, Room 012, HfG Karlsruhe
Free admission, donation requested

Price information:

Donation requested