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TRIESTE 2025

Enrico Masi • Director of Terra incognita

“The film is a manifesto for a kind of cinema which finds the courage to go ‘hand-to-hand’ with the world’s conflicts”

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- Exploring the theme of energy supply, Masi’s new documentary is kicking off a tour of screenings in Italy’s biggest cities

Enrico Masi • Director of Terra incognita

Terra incognita [+see also:
film review
interview: Enrico Masi
film profile
]
, Enrico Masi’s new documentary which was presented in the Trieste Film Festival, explores the theme of energy supply through the telling of two stories: a family living on a remote mountain pasture in Piedmont and the ITER atomic experiment which is underway in the Caradache energy centre in France, where scientists are trying to reproduce solar energy through the process of atomic fusion. We sat down with the director to discuss his movie, which has just started touring Italy’s biggest cities.

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Cineuropa: How did the film come about?
Enrico Masi:
It all began with my co-screenwriter Stefano Migliore and I feeling that we needed to get to grips with a huge environmental subject-area, from both a cultural and a formal viewpoint, and utilising cinematographic resources that we hadn’t used in our previous films. For a long time, almost until the very end of the process, Terra incognita was a tribute to Franco Farinelli and Umberto Eco in our eyes, but it was also a mini Space Odyssey - European and Atlantic in this instance. ITER came onto the scene after almost 3 years of research between Italy, France and Germany, and we decided to talk about it as the biggest transnational energy-based experiment underway in Europe, and probably in the world.

The film juxtaposes footage of nuclear development with that of a family who have made the radical decision to live drawing minimally on nature’s resources. What did you hope to achieve by interweaving these two stories?
Thinking through the prism of contradictory storytelling allows authors, and subsequently viewers, to question their own expectations of one or other of the examples put forth in the film. It’s a dramaturgical tool, an approach with a binary format which we tried to move beyond by writing Solange – the guardian of the observatory and a cardinal character in the final production stages - into the film. There are quite a few quotations from and references to key figures in German culture: besides Alexander von Humboldt, there’s also Goethe, Steiner and obviously Beuys. The human relationship with nature is a huge leitmotiv in the German universe, and this melds into Italian nature in the Alps.

The film asks the audience to allow themselves to be transported by the images and sounds, and to draw their own ideas, because Terra incognita doesn’t have captions like traditional documentaries. Instead, it seems to be a wonderfully edited flux which deconstructs cinéma du réel and turns it into an anthropological reflection.
The intensity of our experiences working on this project, the rewards reaped after long sessions of location scouting in places central to this Anthropocene era, in the heart of Europe, the constant dialogue with different committees about languages, the role of the archive, and choices of a purely cinematographic kind (optics, formats, films, complex sequence shots), all the way up to the final editing phase, overwhelmed us.

We’ve been marked by this lengthy period of creativity. The aim of including humanity in this reflection on technology and energy resources also led us to a journey “inside” of literature. It was all-consuming. I doubt whether it would be possible to embark upon another experience as long as this one, spent absorbing information. I’m writing a book, a cinema-documentary manual, which allows me to express and convey these facts and the encounters we had. It’s important to say that the whole Terra incognita project, which is my fifth feature film, is an attempt to bequeath a code, a manifesto for a kind of cinema which finds the courage to go “hand-to-hand” with the conflicts of this world in which we live. Energy and humans’ relationship with natural resources is one of these conflicts and, in this sense, it’s an anthropological reflection.

Sound is especially important in Terra incognita. Can you tell us about your research into the film’s music?
I spent a lot of time with Fabrizio Puglisi, who previously authored the music in Shelter - Farewell to Eden [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, thinking about the role the soundtrack should play. There were three big jam sessions held for Terra incognita, one of which was live and which ended up in the film, as well as in the audio-documentaries we produced with RAI Radio 3, which are real philosophical and musical compendiums of the film. Fabrizio Puglisi invited a range of musicians to take part in the project, including Vincenzo Vasi, Margareth Kammerer, Achille Succi and Alberto Capelli, who developed their own interpretations based on our suggestions as authors. Jacopo Bonora, the film’s sound technician, worked on a series of recordings which eventually became an album, sharing the same title as the film.

(Translated from Italian)

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