«I have loved digital systems and techniques since the beginning, but I love painting on paper even more, because it is a bit rebellious, because it reacts to every impulse in a slightly different way each time, thus giving rise to a dialogue between the tools and those who hold them».
This is how Giovanni Columbu, the director from Nuoro, describes his new passion for animated cinema. With his first work, “Balentes”, he makes his debut on the big screen with animated drawings.
The film produced by Luches srl and Rai Cinema, co-produced by Tama Filmproduktion and distributed by MyCulture, was presented to the press this morning in Cagliari, at the Spazio Odissea cinema , the same one that will host the public premiere, on Thursday 29th at 7pm and 9.15pm.
The work, freely based on the true story of two boys who, in Sardinia in 1940, on the eve of the Second World War, freed a herd of horses destined for the front, elaborates formal solutions partly inspired by expressionist cinema and partly deduced from techniques used in hyperrealist painting.
The drawings were made on paper and with a brush by the director himself, with the aim of restoring uniqueness and freedom to the primary and constitutive element of the drawing, that is, the sign, otherwise destined to conform to pre-established models. After an initial research lasting about two years, the work was supported by several collaborators who were asked to cut out particular masks to be positioned along the profiles of the drawings. This allowed the author to generate, even in the animation processes, a sort of iconic paradox given by very rapid, impulsive and gestural signs, which nevertheless find a perfect conclusion on the previously defined profiles. The figures are often rarefied. They appear in the field and then disappear without going beyond the limits of the scene, as if they were passing through invisible doors.
«When I revisited the first experiments in animation, which date back to the end of the nineteenth century, I discovered technical and expressive solutions that had been forgotten - explains Columbu - but were still full of charm and could be taken up again in a current perspective, making new forms of representation possible».
