Il Buco

During the economic boom of the 1960s, Europe’s highest building is being built in Italy’s prosperous North. At the other end of the country, young speleologists explore Europe’s deepest cave in the untouched Calabrian hinterland. The bottom of the Bifurto Abyss, 700 meters below Earth, is reached for the first time. The intruders’ venture goes unnoticed by the inhabitants of a small neighbouring village, but not by the old shepherd of the Pollino plateau whose solitary life begins to interweave with the group’s journey. IL BUCOchronicles a visit through unknown depths of life and nature and parallels two great voyages to the interior.

93 min/Italy/France/Germany/Italian with English subtitles/2021/Cert. U

World Premiere and Winner of the Special Jury Prize – Venice International Film Festival

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Michelangelo Frammartino was born in Milan in 1968. He studied Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, where he developed a passion for the relationship between physical space and photographic images, video and cinema. After graduation, he continued his studies at Civica Scuola del Cinema in Milan, where he designed video installations influenced by Studio Azzurro’s art research.

Frammartino’s debut IL DONO (2003), a no-budget feature film, shot in his parents’ village in Calabria, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival. It went on to win the Grand Prix at the Annecy Film Festival and the Jury Prize at both Thessaloniki and Warsaw.

Frammartino’s second feature LE QUATTRO VOLTE (2010) premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. The film won the Europa Cinemas “Best European Film” award in Cannes and the main prize at CPH:DOX. It was also the 2010 Directors’ Fortnight “Coup de coeur”.

In 2013, Frammartino’s installation ALBERI, a 26-minute loop, premiered at MoMA PS1 and was subsequently shown at other museums, including Centre Pompidou’s 2021 Hors Pistes Festival.

Frammartino’s third feature film IL BUCO was shot in Southern Italy, in the neighbouring regions of Calabria and Basilicata, which continue to inspire him and where all his previous works were shot. With the approach of an anthropologist, Frammartino captures the traditional and transcendent with a simplicity and spirituality that is unique to his filmography.

Filmography

2021   Il Buco
2013   Alberi (short documentary)
2010   Le Quattro Volte
2003   Il Dono (The Gift)
2002   Io Non Posso Entrare (short)
2001   Scappa Valentina (short)
1999   BIBIM (short – co-directed with Cafi Mohamud)
1997   L'Occhio e lo Spirito (short)
1995   Tracce (short)

★★★★
"Italian film-maker Michelangelo Frammartino, creator of the subtle and beautiful movie Le Quattro Volte (The Four Seasons), has returned with his first substantial feature in 12 years.  It is effectively another silent movie: a mysterious, wordless evocation to Calabria in southern Italy, notionally set in the early 60's but actually unfolding in something like ecological time."
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

★★★★★
"A study of humanity's hubris against nature's immovable permanency."
"The contrast between the comforting sounds of the cattle and the unsettling deep of the cave lay out the film's thesis in a single image. The beauty of the pastoral is set against the sublime of nature's permanence through visual juxtaposition alone."
Christopher Machell, Cine-vue

"I wrote a few words about the best film I saw at #LFF (or perhaps - spoiler alert - anywhere?!) this year, Michelangelo Frammartino's Il Buco. Il Buco takes viewers on a meditative dive through the caves of Calabria.  Michelangelo Frammartino travels 700-metres below earth for this captivating recreation of a 1961 cave expedition by a team of Italian speleologists."
Ben Nicholson, Sight & Sound

★★★★★
"...looks tenderly, elegantly, discerningly at humanity's topsy-turvy preoccupations through the expert eye of the great cinematographer Renato Berta (an Alain Resnais regular). Bird sounds start the film, as we see the sky from below, from the perspective of a cave with a vaguely horseshoe-shaped opening."
Anne-Katrin Titze, EyeforFilm

★★★★
"A film as delicate as dripping water, with depths that are quietly waiting to be plumbed.
There’s leisure time too: in one lovely sequence, two men punt a football back and forth over the entrance to the cave, until the inevitable occurs.The speleologists themselves are largely watched at a distance, like background players in a Jacques Tati comedy. And as in Tati, the re are jokes so subtle here that it’s as if we’re being dared to miss them."
Robbie Collin, The Daily Telegraph

★★★★
"Spellbinding...an arrestingly beautiful work. It finds a pure visual poetry in the way the mossy light of the mountain dusk is echoed by the velvety sage tones of the lichen-covered cave mouth; the way the ancient geological etching on the face of a cow herder evokes the weathered land that he walks each day."
Wendy Ide, The Observer

★★★★★
"Michelangelo Framartino literally and figuratively plumbs the depths with new feature Il Buco, which is peppered with the same kind of gentle humour and moment of incidental magic we saw in this 2010 masterpiece Le Quattro Volte.. Devoid of almost any dialogue, and told in a deliberately unhurried fashion, Frammartino’s latest might sound like a difficult proposition, but the experience of watching it is anything but...the film is imbued with a gentle humour and moments of incidental magic that speak to the many undiscovered mysteries of the world around us."
Patrick Gamble, The Skinny

"Six films to oblique...sometimes madly spectacular caving drama."
Danny Leigh, Financial Times

★★★★ 
“It’s a rare film that actually makes you reconsider your relation to the planet, but Il Buco is such a film. There’s nothing remotely mystical about it – it simply takes you down to the bowels of the earth, then gazes up at the mountains and sky, and leaves you dizzyingly refreshed and not a little awed.” 
"Michelangelo Frammartino is known for Le Quattro Volte, his idiosyncratic musing on trees, goats and natural cycles, and Il Buco is every bit as wonderful. It’s about as immersive as a film can be."
This is a film you should try and see on the big screen, as its sound mix of footsteps, water drops and the occasional distant cowbell is pure, physique concrete. It’s quiet, low-key, but no less a masterpiece for that.”
Jonathan Romney, Uncut Magazine

★★★★★
“It's a magnificent piece of work, completely beguiling from end to end and one which wears its immense philosophical profundity with admirable lightness.”
David Jenkins, Little White Lies

★★★★
"Alternating stunningly beautiful scenes of the wild, unspoiled Calabrian countryside, populated mainly by goats and cattle, with undergrouond scene.....a slow, cinematic essay juxtapoing different themes and celebrating unspoiled nature, leaving the viewer to extract meaning from its disparate elements."
Dennis Leachman,Movies1.TV

"A slow and thoughtful film which is captivating and charming in equal measures.The first you'll notice is the jaw-dropping visuals, the Italian countryside conjured uup beautifully through the magical lens of Renato Berta, but it's the quiet and studied normality which really stays with you. That's the tru joy of Frammartino's little gem. Il Buco is an unassuming and delicate docudrama which slowly creeps under your skin."
Rob Aldam, Backstreet Mafia

★★★★★
“It's a magnificent piece of work, completely beguiling from end to end and one which wears its immense philosophical profundity with admirable lightness.”
David Jenkins, Little White Lies

★★★★
"There is none of the philosophical existentialism of Werner Herzog in his Cave of Forgotten Dreams, but there is certainly a subtle awareness of both the wonder of this cave and the contradiction at the heart of its exploration - of northerners exploring and treating something the southerners are familiar with iike a discovery."
None of this is ever stated out loud, and therein iies much of the magic. This is a film to wash yourself away in, to allow its undertated style to flow freely throgh your headspace.  A truly refreshing work of art."
Fedor Tot, We Love Cinema

★★★★
"Frammartino has created a meditative film. It mixes beautiful camera work with a message. It is a sheer delight to look at, and the thoughts it prompts will leave you scratching your head."
Dan Carrier, Camden New Journal/Islington Tribune/West End Journal

Lucia Rinaldi,Times Literary Review

★★★★
"There is something so mysterious and unknowable about Il Buco - part docu-drama, part mediatiaon on the natural world and the passage of time... it lingers long after more superficially thrilling films have begun to fade from the memory."
Songlines

★★★★
"A pure pleasure. I'm not certain I can fully explain it.  I'm not convinced it matters.
“in its meditative, unhurried fashion on the beauties of geological time...it was a pleasure to sit for a spell with Il Buco, to watch the old farmer, the young cavers and to listen to the sound of the wind in the trees.'
“It's not quite a documentary, yet nor is it exactly a narrative feature.  It lives alone; the cinematic equivalent of a hermit on a mountaintop.”
Xan Brooks, (Venice FF review), The Guardian

“Il Buco proves that cinema still has the capacity to astonish in a very innocent, childlike way as a medium in which light illuminates a black screen and creates beauty.”
Lee Marshall, Screen International

Read Interviews with Michelangelo Michelangelo
in Financial Times by Jonathan Romney
by Nick Chen in Dazed Magazine
in Little White Lies magazine by Ben Nicholson
Industria Movies words by James Motram

'Critic's Pick'
"Like Frammaratino's previous feature "Le Quattro Volte" (also shot in the Calabrian countryside), this one adopts a rigourously objective, pointedly nonhuman point of view. Whether you are looking up from mouth of the cave, down into its murky, winding depths or across the cloud-swept valley whose floor it scars, you are seeing the world as it might look through the disembodied eyes of nature or time itself."
A.O.Scott, The New York Times


"Where nature, the universe, and humans converge… A mystical cinematic experience”"In the vertical journey from life to death, when you surrender your entire being, your body and mind will experience a comforting bliss.”  
Bong Joon-ho (Parasite)

“IL BUCO moved us very much. It is a truly cinematic achievement, a film that we believe should be seen on the biggest screen possible. It is an experience you must have in the theatre.
..it is a beautiful meditation on life and man’s relationship with nature and mortality. I had a transcendent experience watching the movie, deeply moving. It is not really about where the film comes from, what language they speak - it is this physical reaction that I have watching that film. It is a gut feeling.” Chloe Zhao (Nomadland)

“…Masterful work of sound and sight.”
“…it stands powerfully on its own, offering breathtaking images of rural Italy and a subtle interrogation of the slow creep of change and modernity.”
“Il Buco is a soothing watch best viewed in the darkness of a cinema. It’s an immersive experience whose reward comes from the way Frammartino slowly builds on minutiae in work of the shepherd and the speleologists.”
Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

“Frammartino handles the collision between a vanishing then and the encroaching now with a light touch, mournful yet not quite damning.”

“Frammartino trains his focus on rich symbols encapsulating the intrusion of modernity on tradition and antiquity, and he does so in uniquely striking visual terms that capitalize on his one-of-a-kind location shooting in Earth’s bowels.”
Charles Bramesco, The Playlist

★★★★
"A pure pleasure. I'm not certain I can fully explain it.  I'm not convinced it matters.
“in its meditative, unhurried fashion on the beauties of geological time...it was a pleasure to sit for a spell with Il Buco, to watch the old farmer, the young cavers and to listen to the sound of the wind in the trees.'
“It's not quite a documentary, yet nor is it exactly a narrative feature.  It lives alone; the cinematic equivalent of a hermit on a mountaintop.”
Xan Brooks, The Guardian

“Il Buco proves that cinema still has the capacity to astonish in a very innocent, childlike way as a medium in which light illuminates a black screen and creates beauty.”
Lee Marshall, Screen International

Read Interviews with Michelangelo Michelangelo
in Financial Times by Jonathan Romney
by Nick Chen in Dazed Magazine
in Little White Lies magazine by Ben Nicholson
Industria Movies words by James Motram

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Upright Poster image

Poster image 16/9 for Twitter etc

Interview with Renato Berta in Variety

Interview with Michelangelo Frammartino in Cineuropa

Trailer on YouTube - link or embed

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5 short teaser clips - square for Instagram/Twitter

Clips

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