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DO NOT ASK US FOR WORDS - IL SACRO MONTE DI VARALLO

By Elisabetta SGARBI, Eugenio LIO (ASSISTANT DIRECTOR)

BETTY WRONG - as PROD

Documentary - Completed 2008

- Year of production
- 2008
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- ITALY
- Languages
- ITALIAN, ENGLISH
- Duration
- 67 mn
- Director(s)
- Elisabetta SGARBI, Eugenio LIO (ASSISTANT DIRECTOR)
- Writer(s)
- Edward CAREY, Giovanni TESTORI, Juan DE LA CRUZ, Sebastiano VASSALLI, Umberto ECO, Vittorio SGARBI
- Cast
- Toni SERVILLO (VOICE)
- Producer(s)
- Elisabetta SGARBI (BETTY WRONG)
- Synopsis
- Angels and Women-Madonnas full of light, “lips bursting with tenderness and love as if poetry could ascend into Heaven. The grain has a delicate, shiny mountain colour. Frescos going through the vibrant greatness and joyful delight of details. Marvellous beasts that are the clear signs of Gaudenzio’s bestiary. Mountain people, people coming from the most scattered, far-away places in a simple, powerful image of themselves. Gaudenzio climbs up and goes further down, turning into a bricklayer, bringing us back the humble, unpretentious, familiar sense of an artisan familiarity of the three chapels: of Nativity, of the Visit of the Shepherds, of the Visit of the Magi.
  And all the time Tazio has in front of himself the colours of his valley, the whites of the glaciers, the blues and the pinks of the snows; the blacks of the cliffs; the rocks, the shrubs growing there, clung in desperation; the slim trunks, the leather of the saddlebags; the fingers; the teeth; the eyes; the eyes gazing, searching, fearing, invoking, protesting, asking. And then, some more and always certain mountain flowers : aquilegias, lilies, thistles, cyclamens…” (Giovanni Tstori)
  It The story the that the Varallo sacred mountain delivers us in the masterpieces by Gaudenzio Ferrari, Tanzio da Varallo, Gherardini, Morazzone and Ceranino, is sacred and utterly human, and one that the “cinematiceye”, like while climbing, struggles to seize.
  We get closer there, where the visitor’s eyes can’t reach, beyond the gratings, the windows, the boundaries which protect and move away these statues/paintings/people, and we mix amongst them, inhabiting their houses/chapels and meeting one by one every character of this petrified crowd. It is snowing. Yet that snow seems to fall exactly when those statues/people reveal to us that they are alive, full of passion and emotion. The torches burn all around. And cause faces and nostrils to vibrate.