Lumina – Roberto Turigliatto

Like his peers Fulvio Risuleo and Andrea Sorini, Samuele Sestieri belongs to a generation of young filmmakers who, with proudly low-budget productions, are completely breaking free from the canon of the so-called cinéma du reel that has been prevalent in Italy in recent years. The Bear Tales, a surreal fairytale he made together with Olmo Amato, was already some kind of unidentified object, an anomaly in the Italian panorama.

Lumina resumes the visionary poetics of its author. We are again in a post-apocalyptic dimension, in this case a lost world amongst the rubble of abandoned villages in the Basilicata and Lazio regions. But this “science fiction documentary”, says Sestieri, “transforms itself into an intimate and personal coming-of-age story”. At the same time, Lumina is a film about cinema and vision, about the memory of objects, and about energy that exposes an indecipherable past and its ghosts.

Fascinated by popular culture as well as the avant-garde, fantasy and radical auteur cinema, Sestieri has been a great lover of cinema since childhood, and was an animator of blogs and online magazines. He certainly brings to his cinema an admiration of cartoons and of his favourite filmmakers, from Malick to Rossellini and Wakamatsu, while transcending this in an original, spontaneous and experimental way that will be fascinating to follow in the future. Lumina is an expression of love for cinema and new idioms, as if film could regain its original light, as if it could return to its beginnings − even as a postmodern, digital offshoot.

Written by Roberto Turigliatto