10/09/2010

Prolific documentary filmmaker Andrea Caccia’s first feature-length Life in the Time of Death [+see also:
trailer
film profile], is an interesting, three-act and five-years-in-the-making meditation on life through its very antithesis. The film had its world premiere in Venice Days.

In the first part, Caccia wordlessly captures images of nature and a group of young men and women frolicking at a lake. In other words, the flourishing of life and the obliviousness to mortality and death.

The second act comprises interviews with terminally ill people who speak profoundly of how they only began to appreciate life only when faced with death. Their words are surprisingly full of hope and warmth, despite their pain and fear. The men and women speak of being “born” on the day they were diagnosed; how there is no darkness without light; and how the very nature of life is love.

One patient puts it most succinctly: “There is a seventh sense, and it is the life/death dichotomy, but its purest truest form comes only when faced with leaving, losing life. It is a gift, but too precious sometimes. Most mortals don’t feel it.”

The film’s most personal part is the final segment, in which Caccia and his brother empty out their family garage. Caccia offers poetic, off-camera narration as they uncover objects long-since forgotten, which chronicle their lives and the inexorable march of time. All against the backdrop of the illness to which their father succumbed.

Love in the Time of Death was produced by Massimo Schiavon of Roadmovie for €50,000, with support from the Piemonte Doc Film Fund and the Piedmont Film Commission.

Vedozero [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Caccia’s second feature-length documentary, made over the past two years, will actually have a limited theatrical release in Milan on September 17 and two weeks later in Rome. This original, high concept film is a collection of 70 video diaries produced by high school students using 70 cell phones supplied them by Roadmovie.