Directed by:
Gianfranco RosiScreenplay:
Gianfranco RosiCinematography:
Gianfranco RosiPlots(1)
A nobleman from the Piemonte region and his daughter share a one-room efficiency in a modern apartment building along the GRA where they have been assigned temporary housing. In the cramped rooms, they pass the time with conversations that swing from the sophisticated to the banal. A botanist like a Merlin armed with sound effects and an arsenal of poisons searches for a way to stop the plague of rapacious insects that is destroying an entire plantation of palms at a section where the GRA loses itself in wide grassy fields and flocks of sheep. A modern-day prince who does gymnastics while smoking his cigar on the roof of his castle, which seems to have sprouted magically from among the faceless modern buildings that crowd an exit of the GRA. He has transformed the castle into a bed&breakfast, a conventional center, movie sets, and on special Sundays a theater for ornately-designed fables for children and adults. Like an astronaut on a first aid mission with his dayglo uniform and his glittering ambulance, a paramedic patrols the GRA, warming freezing bums who have fallen into drainage ditches, extracting young speed demons from cars crumpled around guard railings, resuscitating misunderstood heart attack victims, while in his off hours tending an old woman in his lonely house. A seventh-generation eel fisherman, and one of the last, lives on the Tiber River in the shadow of a snarl of overpasses, dispensing to curious observers his wise and ancient philosophy of life as he maneuvers his boat and tends his nets exactly as his forefathers did. Far from the iconic sites of Rome, the GRA is a repository of stories of those at the edges of the ever-expanding universe of the capital city. (official distributor synopsis)
(more)Reviews (1)
A quiet, non-interventionist, observational documentary about the diverse inhabitants of the simple Roman suburbs, where the common factor is a large highway loop road, focuses mainly on human, sprawling, and ephemeral nature, aided by the evil palm weevil as a metaphor. Understandably, it's boring as shit.
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