Rare Animals

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TYPE: Documentary Feature
GENRE: Documentary
STATUS: Pre-Production

LOGLINE

In this documentary about climate change and natural harvests, wine foregrounds the human spirit of a grassroots winemaker working at the base of Mount Etna.

SYNOPSIS

RARE ANIMALS is a documentary that highlights the life cycle of a single harvest and follows a renegade winemaker, Davide Bentivegna, who has given up everything to push against an abusive agricultural system contending with changing climate patterns that threaten his very existence.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

Using a rigorous but highly intimate visual approach inspired by the films and art of Hlynur Pálmason, Michelangelo Frammartino, and Corinna Belz, this documentary will situate the audience in the life and work of Davide Bentivegna using an observational mode that weaves together narrative dramaturgy with the classic documentary form. The harvest schedule will act as the architectural core of the film. The film’s story, along with its critical arguments, will unfold patiently. This will allow the various challenges surrounding Bentivegna’s rising star in the natural winemaking world to come about organically. The idea is to have a style that positions the highly intimate inside the grandiose. The film will highlight the bitter tension between our interior and exterior worlds, their horrors and tremendous Beauties. Wine, while central to the story, will act more like a conduit to express the various philosophical dilemmas foregrounded by climate change and what it means to create something in a world that is crumbling, similar to the way honey betokened notions of humanity in Tamara Kotevska‘s HONEYLAND. In this sense, I am making a film about a winemaker to the extent that I am observing the patterns of a troubled artist.

KEY CREW

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