Campolungo

A director in transit, Adriano Valerio is one of those Italian filmmakers whose cinema is mapping out an expressive and conceptual escape beyond all borders. His feature film debut with Banat – Il viaggio reaches the heart of a process outlined in expression and cultural terms in the short films that precede and follow it, making him an example of a filmmaker sensitive to the fluidity of narrative forms and to the expressive and production possibilities of all types of cinema. Having trained in Italy in Marco Bellocchio’s workshop, Adriano Valerio decided to seek out in France the visual and thematic horizons of his filmmaking perpetually pushed towards an elsewhere, where figures and spaces are found and lost at the same time. His feature debut with Banat – Il viaggio tells of a love story poised between Puglia and Romania, clinging to the uncertainties of place and heart. Themes that Valerio had already explored in the magnificent short 37°4 S, a highly sensitive chronicle of the love pangs of an adolescent lost in the heart of the Atlantic, with which he won a special mention at Cannes and the David di Donatello. However all his cinema is a journey through emotional states suspended over the uncertainties of the present, as his other shorts demonstrate: the two children lost in the early afternoon in the countryside in Agosto, the shifting feelings in a relationship between Bari and Casablanca in Mon amour mon ami, the expectation and dream of (football) redemption in Tunisia in Les aigles de Carthage, the instinct to escape in Shanghai between loneliness and anxiety in The Nightwalk and the anguish of an inevitable departure in the recent Calcutta 8:40 AM.

Beatrice Fiorentino, Massimo Causo
Curators, Campolungo