SCAZZICARE

Julien Colardelle has dedicated himself to the dialogue between the living arts and cinema since he is very young. Witnessing the efferves- cence of his generation by constantly filming artists at work, he accompanies the work of many musicians, directors and choreographers (Nat Jenkins, Jacques Bioulès, Carolyn Carlson, Elsa Wolliaston, Rana Gorgani...)

After a master’s degree in ethno-musicology and ethnochoreology, he is invited in 2012 to work as a programmer at the famous Saint Merry church in Paris, where he founded the SOUFFLE(S) collective, which for seven years organised gathering of the young contemporary crea- tion at the crossroads of cultures, from which many recognised festivals and cultural events were born.

In 2016, he participated in the production and direction of an English series One Two, which presents the daily life of musicians in concert, broadcast on the BBC. He then worked as assistant director and artistic collaborator for Lucie Berelowitsch on the creation of her show ANTIGONE with the independent theatre company Dakh theater from Kiev. A meeting with the director Tony Gatlif led to a year’s work with him, during which he assisted him in the writing, casting and shooting of his film Avril et Djam in Turkey and Greece.

In 2017, he became one of the producers and collaborators of filmmaker Vincent Moon and explorer Priscilla Telmon. Together they work on the Petites Planètes Collection - an experimental ethnography of the 21st century, consisting of over 800 films and music recordings made around the world. In 2018, he is artistic director of Good Chance Theatre a programme that, through theatre and art, creates new kinds of communities for refugees in France, bringing together international artists and connecting people around their stories and cultures. With Antoine Viviani, Antoine Thirion and Fabien Danesi, he founded the Providenza residency in Corsica, which hosts filmmakers and musicians from around the world every summer. In 2019, he direct the making-of of the film Kongo by Hadrien La Vapeur and Corto Vaclav, produced by KIDAM and Pyramides distribution. Scazzicare is his first feature-length film as a writer-director.

Victoria Mendonça is a Brazilian director and screenwriter from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She studied Philosophy and Cinema, completing a master’s degree in Directing and Screenwriting at Eicar Film School of Paris. Her graduation short, She Walks, was premiered at Rotterdam International Film Festival, and being shown in several festivals in places such as New York, France, Rome, Portugal, Canada, and San Francisco, being distributed by Unifrance. After working as a researcher at Ridley Scott Associated in London, she returned to Brazil to shoot her latest short film, Selvagem, selected to be part of the European Short Pitch and supported by the Ile-de-France Region in France, receiving a post-production grant in 2017. While working as a screenwriter of films and series for companies such as O2 Filmes, Conspiração and Netflix; she is finishing the post-production of her first feature documentary Scazzicare, produced by Mimesis and shot entirely in the south of Italy. She currently develops her future projects, the documentary The Waves, selected for the Dok CoPro Market in DOK Leipzig 2019 and her first fiction feature, Mariposa, produced by 3 Tabelas Filmes.

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2021 Feature Documentary The Waves | RJ, Brasil (pre-production)

2018-2021 Feature Documentary Scazzicare | Italy & Russia (post-production)

2018 Short Documentary ASAP | Brazil 2017 Selvagem | France, Brasil & Russia

2014 Short Film She Walks | France

2014 Short Film KATA | Independente | France

2012 Short Film Coisas que Explodem | Brazil

Scazzicare is a road-movie traveling through what connects a past to its present, through what clashes between tradition and modernity, what borders the sacred from the mundane. For two months, we traveled across Grecia Sallantina, following the steps of what remains of the ancient tarantata. Quickly, our quest became a kind of wandering, finding ourselves in a state of exhaustion and melancholy, while trying to offer a foreigner, curious, and loving point of view.

We didn’t quite know what brought us there. Julien is an experimental filmmaker from France, who is constantly working with music, in search of contemplating the experience of trance. He was brought to the world of the tarantati when he first heard a repetitive rhythmic music of the tamborinello, the pizzica, to which was added the «stitched» strings of the violin, with songs in their tense intonation and acidic timbre. A young woman with a stained mast and long black curly hair who danced frantically was turning on herself, in front of an audience dumbfounded by so much energy being released. It’s was from her the first words he heard about the rite of healing called tarantism.

Now Victoria is a Brazilian filmmaker and writer, whose main studies have been around woman’s mythology and the female archetypical symbolism in storytelling. Born into Umbanda tradition, a spirituality where music, trance, and symbols combine themselves into rituals to connect to the spirit world. When they met, she was also on a journey to search her Italian ancestors, which came from the same land as the tarantati. When the words about tarantism were shared between us, quickly we decided to begin the project, not knowing what we would find. Until ten years ago the Pizzica was on the way of extinction, a subject of curiosity only to some musicians and anthropologists, for its mythicalsymbolic and magicreligious ritualistic components. A piece of music known almost only by the people of Salento, deposited and locked in its land, in the memory of what was left of the old peasant society. Recently, it has been the object of renewed international academic interest, and with it, the stories of tarantism, as the discussion of mental illness expands into generations.

The «bite of the tarantula» represents all our inner wounds that are needed, at some point, to externalize. The ritual of tarantism summons the overflowing emotion, while giving it a frame to be able to exist, recognizing a way of accepting mental illness within the community rather than excluding or banishing it. The myth of the tarantula represents the dream of total renewal, eroticism, and fertility. The tarantati rituals happen always in summer, the season that we collect what we sowed. The spider is associated with words and communication. It shows us that the physical world, as we see it, is only the apparent world, a web of illusions and that one must look beyond what is apparent or visible. The more we tried to understand the tarantati, the more we fell into a maze of meanings. It took us some time to understand that what we were looking for wasn’t an explanation or analysis, and that not everything can be fully mapped out. Not everything is compatible with delimitations, contours, schemes. Explanations that would exhaust all darkness. Somethings are much more than what facts can reveal. What we were looking for was a form of belief, a link with the divine. A search for illuminations, communions. On its surface, Scazzicare presents a smattering of ambiguous voiceover testimonials. But in a way, this film is also a sort of offering. To those who have never stopped singing their joys and sorrows. To those who reached the break of madness. To those who found in music some antidote to the venoms of existence. Every memory is a form of encounter. None of this has helped to reach an effective understanding of the drama lived by these women, who, for so many, were nothing but tarantatis. When the doors open, all that remains are questions. But we - we are not so strange anymore.

It took us two years to unravel the web of over 100 hours of collected material and begin to weave a feature-length film out of everything we captured and experienced. This tedious process represented many challenges for us, first and foremost related to the pandemic but also to the creators being spread out across two continents and four countries: Italy, Russia, France and Brazil.

Scazzicarre will be a feature-length debut for both Julien Colardelle and Victoria Mendonça who have already established themselves in the Brazilian and French film industries. Victoria as a screenwriter and Julien as a producer and assistant to a multitude of prolific filmmakers of our times.

The project was brought to me in the spring of 2018 by Victoria who introduced me to Julien. Victoria and I met through our participation in the 10th edition of the European Short Pitch back in 2016, which led me to become a co-producer on her short film Selvagem (2017). After Julien and Victoria pitched the project to me I was instantly hooked and the filming began without much delay in August 2018. From the start, it was our intention to develop this film using our individual resources and keep the production as simple, intimate and close to the subject matter as possible. Victoria and Julien had compiled an extensive and detailed professional artistic dossier on the project, where they clearly outlined their concept and vision for the film and despite the limited resources within which Scazzicarre was made, they have remained faithful to their vision throughout. From a producer’s perspective, this is clear proof of their talent, commitment and determination.

Since I founded Mimesis, I have sought to accompany auteur-driven films and hybrid artistic proposals, which induce other ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, recreating and rewriting the world. I was keen to accompany Victoria and Julien in this process of creating a ‘travelogue’ film where the production strategy is seamlessly integrated into the storyline of the film, as well as the identity of its creators, questioning the very function of cinema. Prior to the production, over a period of 10 years, Julien spent a lot of time in Salento, meeting local artists, musicians and choreographers. Victoria, who was born into a Brazilian family originally from Southern Italy, saw the subject of a documentary project on Tarantism as an opportunity to confront her own vision as a foreigner traveling in this region close to her roots. I myself have a special connection with the Mediterranean region, having divided my time between Moscow and the French Riviera since I was a child. During our production, we were able to receive local logistical support from Dugong Films. Thanks to them, we met our line producer, Michele Daniel, who is originally from Salento.

Now that our first edit is ready, a selection at Paris Doc during Cinéma du réel can help us make substantial progress on our cut, find official co-producers and increase our chances of accessing third party funding that can help formalize our coproduction. In Russia I plan to submit Scazzicarre for a minority co-production grant at the Russian Ministry of Culture and if I succeed we can aim for Scazzicarre to receive an official coproduction status between France, Brazil and Russia. This is a goal I hold very close to my heart and which is aligned with my professional activities. I am actively involved in socioeconomic initiatives within the Russian film industry that aim to promote Russia as an attractive co-production partner and have also registered a limited liability company in my home region of PACA in the South of France.

We must find a resonance within a festival and film forum that welcomes and accompanies such projects. In this regard, Paris Doc that has a focus on cross-cultural collaboration seems to us to be the ideal place to pursue these objectives. We are looking to finalize the editing and post-production work, and to bring together new collaborators in order to be able to implement quality sound editing and mixing into the project - a huge part of the film, as well as counting on the experience and expertise of mentors and colleagues to reach the widest audience possible. Ideally, we see the film premiering at ACID in Cannes. We also plan to participate in film markets such as Sheffield DocFest and Sunny Side of the Doc in order to give our project more exposure and attract the attention of sales agents and distributors to the film.

In conclusion, I need to point out that there is enough material and interest in the phenomenon of Taranstism to add cross-media elements to the Scazzicarre project and create a portal for the artists representing this unique culture of southern Italy, where all the performances and interview sequences we have recorded can also be shared with the public. This can be a great marketing tool for the project. Something similar has been done for projects such as Hibridos, The Spirits of Brazil by Vincent Moon and Priscilla Telmon, or for the film KONGO by Hadrien La Vapeur and Corto Vaclav. These filmmakers are friends and collaborators, whose work has deeply inspired and motivated us to make Scazzicarre.