27/01/2025 - Enrico Masi’s aesthetically enchanting documentary follows a family living without electricity in the Alps alongside experiments with thermonuclear fusion taking place in the South of France

Contrasting a German family’s decision to live in the Italian Alps without electricity or contact with society with the construction of a nuclear fusion reactor in the South of France, Enrico Masi’s Terra incognita [+see also:
interview: Enrico Masi
film profile] opens with a quote from the nineteenth century German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s treatise “Cosmos”: “After a lengthy absence from attempts to understand the world’s physical phenomena and the simultaneous action of forces which pervade certain regions of space, I’m faced with a twofold concern. Who are we in comparison with the cosmos or with the space surrounding Earth? How can art sit comfortably within the definition of science?” In the beginning was the word, Logos. Cosmic law… Following its world premiere in Florence’s Festival dei Popoli back in November, Terra incognita is now competing for the Corso Salani Prize in the Trieste Film Festival.

Visually sophisticated and composed, with slow camera movements and photography (by Stefano Croci and Masi himself, together with Tomas Rigoni) which captures the humid peacefulness of the mountain landscape and the geometrical details of the tangle of tools and cables associated with the nuclear power plant, Terra incognita immerses us in day-to-day life with the Keyenburg family. The father, Gerd, is an admirer of Joseph Beuys and his research into greater harmony between mankind and nature. The film speaks of how Gerd lived in Oberallgau after studying in Monaco, and how the family moved to Monte Rosa after Chernobyl. We see the older sons working without machinery, transporting timber with the help of a horse on steep, wooded slopes, or practicing the cello. Fragments of Beuysian philosophy emerge: “Any art which isn’t capable of shaping society and therefore impacting the heart of this society and the question of capital, isn’t art”… “We need to think about […] what needs to be renounced in order to fully form part of nature or to isolate ourselves from society, and how a person can take part by reshaping themselves…”.  Inserted in amongst these reflections are sections dedicated to the international megaproject, ITER, the path to controlled thermonuclear fusion (whose introduction – we learn on Wikipedia – was postponed to 2039 after discovering cracks in the reactor), accompanied by old archive TV footage, often in black and white, on the race for nuclear energy, with all its glories and its risks, and featuring the testimony of Laban L Coblentz, an American scientific consultant and entrepreneur who’s also ITER’s Head of Communications, and the fleeting presence of Italian nuclear engineer Irene Zammuto.

There aren’t any names superimposed over the film’s images. In fact, Terra incognita isn’t a documentary in the traditional sense of the word, fuelled by the need for some kind of disclosure. It’s more of a reflection offered up by Enrico Masi and his co-scriptwriter and producer Stefano Migliore, on two simultaneous yet opposing ideas about human development and finding resources and energy - whether creative or physical, ancestral or advanced - for sustainable development. It takes the form of a disorderly yet interesting succession of evocatively and aesthetically impactful visual links (editing comes courtesy of Carlotta Guaraldo together with veteran Benni Atria), leaving the audience suspended somewhere between the Keyenburg family’s survivalist dream and the dream/nightmare of Prometheus in the Anthropocene (or capitalocene?), as seen in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile].

Terra incognita is a co-production between Italy and France by Caucaso together with RAI Cinema and Les Alchimistes. Caucaso are distributing the movie in Italian cinemas on Thursday 30 January, with world sales falling to Filmotor.

(Translated from Italian)