PROGRAMME

The event with four guests from practice and research will consist of a round table exploring and discussing the roles of rural landscapes in the realization and reception of films, as well as within film festival strategies:

— Michelangelo Frammartino (film director and lecturer, Milan)

— Silvia Cipelletti (architect from Milan, PhD candidate at the Chair of Locarno Film Festival for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual at Università della Svizzera Italiana USI and assistant at the Academy of Architecture at USI)

— Niccolò Castelli (director of Ticino Film Commission, artistic director of the Solothurn Film Festival, film director, and film producer, Lugano)

— Michael Koch (film director, Basel/Berlin)

Screening of the film LE QUATTRO VOLTE (90 min.) by Michelangelo Frammartino, starting at H19:30

Le quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, IT/DE/CH 2010) is a poetic vision of the revolving cycles of life and nature and the unbroken traditions of a timeless place. The story of one soul that moves through four successive lives.

Biographies

Niccolò Castelli (1982, Lugano) passionate about music, sounds and images, has been collaborating with Swiss National Radio RSI since 1998. After graduating at DAMS Bologna -Faculty of Letters and Philosophy (2005), and being member of ipotesICinema by Ermanno Olmi, he obtained an MA film direction and editing at Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK (2008). His first feature Tutti Giù – Everybody Sometimes Falls (2012) premiered at Locarno Film Festival. After a film writing specialization at Drehbuchwerkstatt München (2014), he has developed his activity as a director for documentaries, reportages, feature films, and in scriptwriting, and collaborated in various cultural fields. His second feature Atlas (2021) opened the major Swiss Film Festival in Solothurn and was selected for numerous festivals, including the 74th Locarno Film Festival. Since 2021 he has been director of Ticino Film Commission and since 2023 artistic director of Solothurn Film Festival.

Silvia Cipelletti (1994, London) is an architect and visual researcher with an MA from the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland. Currently she is a teaching assistant and a PhD candidate in the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF research project The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies, led by prof. Kevin B. Lee. She is also a research associate affiliated with the Laboratory of the History of the Alps in Mendrisio, a guest lecturer at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, and a curator of courses and workshops exploring interfaces between architecture and visual media. Silvia’s architecture short films have been featured at Locarno Film Festival and the Venice Architecture Biennale. She has published essays on architecture and film in Stoà Journal, Magasin for Bygningskunst og Kultur, Cartha, Il Giornale dell’architettura, and Trans Magazine. In 2023, she co-founded Moving Landscape, a filmmaking practice, together with Emil Hvelplund.

Michelangelo Frammartino (1968, Milan to Calabrian parents) enrolled at the Architecture Faculty of the Politecnico di Milano in 1991. From 1994 to 1997 he attended Milan’s film school, Civica Scuola del Cinema, for which he produced videoart installations and worked as a set designer for films and video clips. His first feature fil Il Dono premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2003. His following film Le Quattro Volte (2010) was selected at the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, where it won the Label Europa Cinema. His film Il Buco (2021) was selected for the main competition at the 78th Venice International Film Festival, where it received positive reviews and won the Special Jury Prize.

Michael Koch (1982, Lucerne) studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (2003–2008). His debut feature film Marija had its world premiere in competition at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2016. The film was internationally screened at several festivals such as in Toronto, Busan, Angers, and Gothenburg, and won numerous national and international awards. His second feature film Drii Winter (A Piece Of Sky) was invited to the international Competition at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival and received a Special Mention from the jury. The film screened at over 50 festivals, won prizes in Chicago, Thessaloniki and Gent, the Swiss Film Award for Best Feature Film (2023) and it was Switzerland’s official submission for the International Feature Film Competition at the 95th Academy Awards®. Koch lives and works together with his wife and three children in Basel and Berlin.

Jacqueline Maurer (1984, Aarau) is an art historian, film scholar, critique, and curator exploring interrelations between cinema, architecture and urban, infrastructural and rural landscapes. For her PhD thesis (2021, funded by SNSF Doc.CH) about Jean-Luc Godard in Cinema Studies (University of Zurich UZH), whose publication is in preparation, she spent several research stays in Paris and London. After her postdoctoral fellowship 2022/23 at Collegium Helveticum (Zürich) she is currently proceeding her interdisciplinary research on cinema and rural landscapes as Residente at Istituto Svizzero di Roma 2023/24 and guest researcher at Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History. After Rome she is joining the research group at the institute ArchitekturWerkstatt at Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences FH OST in Sankt Gallen as part of the SNSF Sinergia Project Aerial Spatial Revolution (Mendrisio/Fribourg/Sankt Gallen; 2023–27).