Lights, Drama, Action!

The Devil's Soup

La zuppa del demonio
Australian Premiere

CAST

Italy | 2014 | 78 mins
Documentary
Choice archive footage and excellent editing.
The Hollywood Reporter
DIRECTOR Davide Ferrario

After many years as a film critic, Ferrario (born in Lombardy, 1956) started a distribution company. Hi debut feature came in 1989 with La fine della note starring cult American indie filmmaker John Sayles. Ferrario is best known for his 2004 film After Midnight (Dopo mezzanotte) which earned two awards in Berlin. He has written two novels, and founded his own production company, Rossofuoco.

Italy’s industrial miracles of the twentieth century are explored in Davide Ferrario’s insightful documentary that combines an impressive range of 100 years of archival footage with literary texts to thoughtprovoking effect. Material shot by famous Italian directors such as Ermanno Olmi and Dino Risi, is merged with the work of poets and writers such as Dino Buzzati, Italo Calvino, and the assassinated Pier Paolo Pasolini, to create an astounding metaphor about the utopia of industrial and technological progress as the solution to humanity’s problems.

The title of the film is an expression used by Dino Buzzati in a 1964 documentary to describe the production of steel in the furnaces of Taranto, or more specifically, the mass that is created by steel melting. As centuries-old olive groves fell under the weight of machines and enormous factories, this was a time when the utopia of progress was accepted by all living in the illusion of prosperity and a “better future”.

*NOT SCREENING IN HOBART OR BYRON

  • Official Selection
    • Out of Competition - Venice Film Festival 2014
    • Hot Docs Toronto 2014
    • Tribeca Film Festival 2014
All non-English films screen with English subtitles.

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