Dedalo
Manfredo Manfredi
Italy, 1976 / 11’43”
A window is opened by the wind, in the empty inside a man and a woman are sitting in front of each other. The man stands up to close the window but as he passes behind her he grabs her, suffocates her, killing her. Then the story unfolds in a continuous ricochet of situations where the perception of the present, of the past, pure imagination, overlap each other blurring their own boundaries, ambiguous and alluding, up to the closure of the circle and the tale. And yet: the wind, the window opening, the man and the woman, the man who stands up and touches the woman with his hand, she turns with a loving complicit gesture, then the man closes the window… Has nothing happened? A film about the ambiguity of things in a memorial labyrinth.
Regia, soggetto e animazione: Manfredo Manfredi
Musica: Aldo Raparelli
Fotografia: Sergio Faiella
Produzione: Cineteam
Manfredo Manfredi
He graduated in Scenography at the Academy of Fine Arts, in 1958. He began his activity as a scenographer in 1960, in 1962, he made the drawings for the Carosello theme song and sets for films, documentaries and television shows. His experimentation in the field of animated cinema began in 1963, with short films denouncing social wrongs such as ‘Ballata per un pezzo da novanta’ (1966) on the Sicilian mafia, or ‘Su sàmbene non est abba’ (1968), on banditry in Sardinia. From 1968 to 1975, he directed several short films produced by Corona Cinematografica. In 1975, ‘Uva salamanna’ won the Moscow International Film Festival. In 1977, he was nominated at the Oscars for best animated short film with ‘Dedalo’. In the following years he became a member of the Roman Cineteam and he made institutional films, TV specials, dozens of commercials and TV theme songs. In the 1990s, he made two remarkable splendid adaptations of literary works: the XXVI Canto of Dante’s Inferno (known as Ulysses canto), and ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino. At the same time, as a painter, he developed his research in the field of abstract expressionism, an activity that continues to this day. After 20 years entirely dedicated to painting, he has returned to animated cinema with a new film entitled ‘Lo spirito della notte’.