Battiti, il respiro del Vesuvio
Directed by
Maria returns to Naples after having lived for 15 years in Haiti. Her experience with an animist culture makes her see Vesuvius differently now. Driven by curiosity, she approaches the people who live in a symbiotic relationship with the volcano: Ciccio through land and tradition, Francesca through science, Luciano through art. What they all share is a desire to see the volcano in action. Rather than intimidate, Vesuvius enchants the thousands of people living on its slopes, exorcising by various means the subconscious awareness risk everyone has of a catastrophic explosion. Battiti offers the viewer a sort of rite of initiation journey that begins and ends in the company of a mysterious guide: Carlo, the guard of the grotta della Sibilla at the lago d’Averno, which it said to have once communicated with Vesuvius through underground passages.
The film’s climax is a reconstructed eruption of Vesuvius made by integrating computer simulations with real-life eruptions and panic scenes (eruption of 1944). The idea is not just a formal one. A volcanic explosion releases not only lava and rocks but the imagination as well. It marks an instant when the human condition appears at its most precarious, when life and death are no longer seen as opposites but rather as integrated in a perpetual cycle: the lava covering becomes the silt for future life.
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Creative Europe Media Program. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.