I DIARI DI ANGELA / NOI DUE CINEASTI

2018, 125’, produced by In Between Art Film, Selected by the 75th Venice International Film Festival – Out of Competition

ANGELA RICCI LUCCHI

Angela Ricci Lucchi was born in Ravenna in 1942. She studied painting in Salzburg with Oskar Kokoschka. She passed away on 28th February in Milan.

YERVANT GIANIKIAN

Yervant Gianikian studied architecture in Venice before deciding to focus on film in the mid- 1970s. Meeting Angela Ricci Lucchi was a turning point in both her artistic career and private life.

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi built up their impressive, highly praised and original joint oeuvre over a period of 40 years. Their work dissects found footage and makes connections between modernity and 20th-century imperialist violence.

I diari di Angela / Noi due cineasti (2018) is a poignant homage compiled by Gianikian after Ricci Lucchi’s death, using her illustrated diaries and personal film/video reports which captured the life of the couple in Northern Italy and their travels.

“This is my memory of Angela, of our life. I read again these notebooks and discover others I didn’t know about. New elements in her last writings and in the drawings: on the Gothic Line as a little girl, on the “front line” in the World War II. Art school with Oskar Kokoschka in Austria. The pages on him. Dresden. South Tyrol, the house where Mahler composed The Song of the Earth, his love of Alma Mahler, the making of the doll with her features, the artist’s obsession… One last private roll contains the whole of her life as a child, in the family, in public. My effort. Eexamining again all the notebooks of Angela’s infinite Diary and the backward look of our private films, which accompanied our research. My desperate attempt to bring her back to my side, to bring her back to life, the continuation of our work as goal, as mission, through her notebooks and drawings, a sort of map for action in the present, containing its guiding principles and envisaging its continuation. Angela and I have prepared new and important projects to carry out. The promise, the oath, to continue the work” — Yervant Gianikian.