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Continuo by Marco Mazzi - Best Feature Film

About

Jury Statement: The author engages with the land through three qualities: childlike innocence, panta rhei, and the woman-body in the act of dancing. His gaze is anything but neutral; indeed, it makes no secret of his desire for the women he films, admiring them in pantheistic gestures that reveal the natural substance of being in the sinuous softness of leaves, water and rocks, while also exposing the grey contradictions of an unnatural, squared-off world that has presumed to replace the universal continuous forms.

Synopsis

Continuo is a visual symphony exploring the themes of landscape and portraiture. The film was conceived as a flow of images that sets out from an imaginary train journey, passing through real landscapes and inner ones. We do not know who the protagonist is, nor whether the film unfolds in a physical space or a mental one. Dance, children at play, flowing water and wind stirring the leaves: everything reality has to offer and show becomes the starting point for a reflection on being alive.

Marco Mazzi

Marco Mazzi (1980) studied contemporary literature at the University of Florence and spent time in Tokyo, where he studied Japanese avant-garde art and visual poetry. He has exhibited at the 798 Art District in Beijing (China), the Komaba Art Museum in Tokyo (Japan), the Turin art fair "Artissima" (Italy), the Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato, Italy) and the Yokohama Museum of Art (Japan). In January 2008 the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo hosted the artist's first solo exhibition in Japan, screening his single-channel video installation Voyager, un viaggio attraverso il tempo e l'acqua (2005-2008). In October 2009 the Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea (MLAC, Rome) hosted Mazzi's exhibition "Vedere e conoscere, la naturalizzazione della visione", curated by the Italian writer and art critic Lorenzo Carlucci. In March 2010 he took part in the exhibition "Il medium disperso" (MLAC, Rome) alongside Keren Cytter and Clemens von Wedemeyer. In 2008 Mazzi founded the non-profit organisation "Relational Cinema Association" at Waseda University in Tokyo. The project involves screenings of films and videos by Francesca Banchelli, Eric Baudelaire, Johanna Billing, Josef Dabernig, Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio, Harun Farocki, Marine Hugonnier, Mark Lewis, Amie Siegel and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Mazzi was photographer in residence at The Department of Eagles (Tirana, Albania), together with Diego Cossentino, during the conference "Pedagogies of Disaster, a Continent Conference". In 2013 Mazzi collaborated with Jonas Staal on the project "The Venice Biennale Ideological Guide". Mazzi also worked as set and stills photographer for the renowned Albanian artist Armando Lulaj during the making of the film "Recapitulation" (2015). The film was part of Armando Lulaj's installation "Albanian Trilogy", commissioned for the Albanian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.