The Open Reel has announced the acquisition of Days and Works, the upcoming feature-length documentary by Italian filmmaker Francesco Dongiovanni. The film follows Peppino Maiullari, who lives in the Italian countryside, flitting between Apulia and Basilicata, Altamura and Matera. His days and his work are dedicated to the land and the animals. The pace of his existence follows the movement of the sky and the wind. Any more information about him is unnecessary, as everything is written in his eyes.
The documentary, which was recently completed, comes four years after Dongiovanni’s latest medium-length documentary, Anapeson – Sleepless, and follows his short films Studio (2016), which was co-produced by The Open Reel, and The Riddle (2017), all of which premiered at the Torino Film Festival and were also handled by the Italian sales agent. Days and Works is also being edited, lensed and produced by Dongiovanni, for the company Murex, with Rosario Milano acting as the executive producer. The movie ties in nicely with his interest in ethnographic and anthropological cinema, as it takes place in his home region of Apulia.
Furthermore, the Italian sales agent has added another anthropological documentary to its slate, in the guise of Inland by Mauro Colombo. The film observes a primary jungle that divides Colombia and Panama. There, guerrillas, drug traffickers, immigrants, indigenous people, farmers, wild animals and the local police cross paths. However, this observation goes beyond the characters in this no man’s land and focuses on the search for meaning in the jungle as a metaphor for the wild within us.
Colombo, who tends to focus on human geography and is interested in social anthropology and the relationship between the human being and nature, has also written, edited, lensed and co-produced Inland, along with Abner Benaim for Panama’s Apertura Films.
Inland premiered at the Havana International Film Festival and was presented with the Best Documentary Award at the Panama International Film Festival and the Yellow Robin Award for Best Film at the Curaçao International Film Festival Rotterdam. The movie’s next stop will be the Morelia International Film Festival, and it has also secured a European premiere in IFFR’s Bright Future.
