Cinema Releases - Lost and Beautiful

To complement Martin Eden, we are also releasing Lost and Beautiful from 2015, Pietro Marcello's 2nde feature.

Despite death threats from the Mafia and his country’s general apathy, a humble shepherd, Tommaso, takes it upon himself to look after the abandoned Bourbon palace of Carditello, north of Naples, deep in the heart of the ‘Land of Fires.’ One day, Tommaso suffers a heart attack and dies: but not before making a final wish. He summons a masked character named Pulcinella to rescue a buffalo calf called Sarchiopone from the forsaken palace. Together, man and beast, embark on a long journey through a lost and beautiful Italy, searching for something which may no longer exist.

Shot on expired 16mm stock, Lost and Beautiful is a ravishing work that (after The Mouth of the Wolf) presaged the arrival of an extraordinary new filmmaker.

Cert PG

Born in Caserta in 1976, Pietro Marcello attended the Accademia di Belle Arti, where he studied painting. Self-taught, he has worked as a teacher in a Naples prison, and he organised and planned the Cine Damm film season between 1998 and 2003 at the Damm in Montesanto, Naples. During that period, he started making radio programmes (Il tempo dei magliari) and documentaries. In 2003 he made his first short films, Carta and Scampia.

The following year he completed Il Cantiere, a documentary that won the 11^th edition of Libero Bizzarri. In 2005 he made the documentary La Baracca, which won the public prize at Videopolis. That year he also collaborated as a volunteer with an NGO in Ivory Coast to create the documentary Grand Bassan.

In 2009, he directed his first feature, The Mouth of the Wolf, winner of the 27th Turin Film Festival, the Caligari and Teddy prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival and the David di Donatello and Nastro d’Argento awards for best documentary

In 2011, he made Il silenzio di Pelešjan (The Silence of Peleshyan), which was presented as a special event at the 68^th Venice International Film Festival and participated at many international festivals. In 2015, he directed Lost and Beautiful, which was screened in competition at the Locarno Festival    and took home the Göteborg Film Festival’s Bergman Award and the Nastro d’Argento for Best  Documentary. Pietro Marcello’s latest feature, Martin Eden, screened in competition at the 76th Venice Film Festival and where Luca Marinelli received the award for Best Actor. It then won the Platform Prize at the Toronto Film Festival where the jury commented: