Let the music do the talking…

… or at least think of it as to the ideal structure to be led by on the unusual and exotic journeys you’re invited to by The Anchorage and The Land Inhabited. The two titles in competition (respectively by C.W. Winter & Anders Edström and by Anna Sanmartí) happen to have much in common. One – despite having a screenplay behind its shoulders – has the formal appearance of a documentary, while the other is a documentary proper; they both do without a clear narrative path and almost without dialogues; they both charm us with the beauty of the nearly uncontaminated landscapes of Swedish (in one case) and Mongolian (in the other) wilderness.

And – although in a very different form and to a slightly less poetic extent – we experienced the chemistry between music (this time concretely performed) and a fascinating sight on the forth night of Kino Otok too, thanks to the concert on the beach by Ante Upedanten, one of those things that mostly can make you blame for you haven’t learnt Slovenian yet (supposing you’re as ignorant as I am)…

Two more music-related coincidences:

1) Ante Pupedanten’s “Poštar” begins with an instrumental intro which comes directly out of “Tammurriata nera”, one of the most famous songs from Naples’ popular tradition. The story told by the song is that of a woman who gets pretty surprised when she sees his newborn baby is black. More or less the same kind of surprise Mohammed Soudani (Taxiphone’s director) told us he had when he realized he was darker-skinned than the average Algerian. But, if I can give you an explanation for the 1st case (it’s the end of WW2 and the woman had had sex with a coloured soldier of the US army, which wasn’t very rare at that time, given the circumstances), I have no ideas about the 2nd. Nor has Soudani (no insinuation intended, be it clear)...

2) Some minutes ago, just after I had begun writing these lines, a brass-band quite unexpectedly (to me, at least) showed up and began playing here below, in Manzioli square.

Kino Otok: you never know what you’re going to get!


Piervi