Espejos 2022
I lupi
Alberto de Michele | 2011 | 17'
SYNOPSIS
The protagonists of this project are a group of thieves between 40 and 70 years old from northern Italy called ‘I Lupi’, ‘The Wolves’. They only steal when it is very foggy. The fog makes everything invisible, including them. They rob houses, banks, jewelry stores, trucks... everything they can take advantage of.
BIOGRAPHY
Alberto de Michele
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Alberto De Michele (Italy, 1980) was born in Venice. Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Alberto De Michele's work explores the tensions that exist between the codes of conduct predominant in the underworld and the moral codes that govern our habits as “good citizens”. He also explores the blurred border between fiction and reality in the stories of the underworld, stories whose own logic implies the impossibility of public verification.
His research leads him to establish links with people who live outside the law, entering and leaving its sphere, but always with the certainty of being on the fringes of their actions. Aware that he is moving through terrain where only a thin line separates these parallel realities, he maintains the minimum distance necessary to never be absorbed into the world of these individuals.
His short film I lupi (2010) won the UIP Award and was nominated for the Tiger Award at the IFFR. I lupi was shown at the Centre Pompidou and the Palais de Tokyo. De Michele's work has been exhibited worldwide in galleries and the Museo Omar Rayo (Colombia). The Last Ride of the Wolves (2022) is his first feature film.
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Critical text
'The Wolves' are a gang of robbers from northern Italy who only operate in dense foggy nights. Director Alberto de Michele accompanies them on one of their “special operations”. Although we know that this gang is made up of several individuals between the ages of forty and seventy (as one of its members tells us), we never see them clearly. Making darkness and the nebulous not only the modus operandi of the criminals, but the essence of the formal bet of his film, De Michele films a ballet of luminous beams and backlit figures in a nocturnal landscape of insistent opacity. The accuracy and strange beauty of the framing combined with a very attentive use of sound make I lupi a hypnotic journey through the nooks and crannies of the new organized crime, and constitute an authentic aesthetic triumph in which narrative mystery and formal abstraction converge. The challenging and subtle energy of this short film would give rise, more than a decade later, to Alberto De Michele's first feature film, La ultima corsa dei lupi (2022), in which the original narrative approach would undergo a new sinuous development and also a highly demystifying story. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH
Technical Sheet
Dirección
Alberto De Michele
Guión
Alberto De Michele
Fotografía
Alberto De Michele
