Journey into The Twilight/ Viaggio nel crepuscolo

Journey into The Twilight/ Viaggio nel crepuscolo
France/Italy, 2021, 142’
in Italian, French, German, English w/ Arm./Eng. subtitles

Director and Scriptwriter: Augusto Contento
Producer: Giancarlo Grande
Animator: Marco Belli
Music: Paolo Cantu, Mark Stewart, Laetitia Sadier
Sound: Stefano Agnini, Daniele Cevasco
Production Company: Cineparallax

Journey into the Twilight retraces the roads that lead to the cold darkness of Italy’s decline: of the family, the patriarchal society, the school system, and of religion. This is a land where the interior of the communal, public, shared space is made out of a colorless, amorphous egoism, where even the revolutionary, socialist, and communist ideals mixed with Manichean Catholicism have transformed into fideistic, totalitarian dogmas. From the opening credits, the animation expresses a combination of places: ghostly, austere, decadent, elegant, and decrepit.

Continuously mixing fiction and documentary, the film structure is able to radically deconstruct narrative forms.

Journey into the Twilight is based on “quantum” editing. The director employs multiple writing styles and cinematographic genres as if they were parallel universes that mirror, multiply and split into each other, determining the form, rhythm, and content of the film in space-time. The ultimate goal is to talk about the main Italian and international issues from unusual points of view.

Augusto Contento

Born in 1973, in Italy, Augusto Contento has lived and worked in Paris since 2000. In 2004, he and Giancarlo Grande founded Cineparallax, the producer of his films. He has made four Brazilian films: Ônibus (2007) won the Vela d’Oro at the Bellaria Film Festival; Tramas (2008) premiered at Locarno and won the Région Île de France prize; Transparent Roads (2008) was presented at Locarno; Roads of Water (2009), presented by Danielle Mitterrand, opened the Rome Film Festival. Two films were shot in Chicago: Parallax Sounds (2012), winner of the UCCA prize at the Torino Film Festival, and Shadowgram (2017), which debuted at the Nouveau Cinéma in Montréal and won the RAI Cinema prize at the Visioni dal Mondo festival in Milan. Red Ashes (2013), shot in Stromboli, was presented at Locarno.

Filmography

Ônibus (short, 2007), Tramas (2008), Transparent Roads (2008), Roads of Water (2009), Parallax Sounds (2012), Journal de bord d’un bateau fantôme (2012), Red Ashes (2013, co-dir), Shadowgram (2017), Journey into the Twilight (2021).