Once upon a time there was a tiny hill town in Tuscany that found a remarkable way to confront their issues - they turned their lives into a play
Date/Time: Jan 9 2018, 2:50 pm to 5:00 pm
Vancouver, Vancity Theatre | Event calendarAge: 19+
Cost: $13.00
Find tickets: here
Spettacolo is a portrait of this 50-year-old tradition, where their piazza becomes their stage and every villager from 6 to 90 plays a part - the role of themselves.
"In a certain sense, Jeff Malmberg and Chris Shellen’s film is a kindred spirit to Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 masterpiece Synecdoche, New York – except, of course, that it’s real. And it also covers terrain familiar to the directors, whose fascinating 2010 documentary Marwencol concerned a brain-damaged man who built a fictional WWII Belgian town in his backyard – populated by action figures that served as proxies for himself and others he knew – and then used it to act out dramas as a means of confronting his own problems. Trauma is similarly at the heart of Spettacolo, whose title is an Italian phrase for "performance." The men and women of Monticchiello began their shows fifty years ago, after a group of 70 local partisans engaged 300 fascists in a firefight on April 6, 1944, and for their trouble were visited by a Nazi commander who threatened to execute them all – only to have his mind changed by the pleas of one brave woman. That incident formed the inspiration for their first play, and they never looked back, having now found an ideal vehicle for "talking to each other and saying what we thought of a problem."
Intensely curious and deceptively profound about the ways in which art both liberates and heals its creators, as well as traps and suffocates them, Malmberg and Shellen’s doc is an engrossing examination of the thorny relationship between reality and fiction – a dynamic epitomized, finally, by Andrea’s sketch of a rustic house emerging from the top of a morose man’s head." Nick Schager, Daily Beast
"Theater lovers and Italophiles alike should savor the documentary Spettacolo , an engaging and wistful look at the tiny Tuscan village of Monticchielloand its longtime tradition of producing "autodramas," works crafted by, starring and thematically inspired by its residents." Gary Goldstein, LA Times
"So poignant and is so intelligently told that it feels wrong, almost insulting, to call Spettacolo charming, even if the movie is often delightful." Manohla Dargis, New York Times
"Truly poetic and delicately beautiful." Francesca Bezzone, L’Italo-Americano
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