The Art of the Real, Milo Rau's Cinema in Naples

The Sala Assoli hosts a focus on the Swiss director's cinema.

For the first time in Naples, the work of Milo Rau (Bern, 1977) is presented, defined from time to time by the best international press as the “most influential”, “most awarded”, “most ambitious”, “most controversial” or “most scandalous” artist of our time.

With his International Institute for Political Murder (IIPM), founded in 2007 for a project on the end of the Ceausescu couple, the Swiss author and director has set himself the goal of a “multimedia treatment of historical and socio-political conflicts” with over fifty shows, films, books, exhibitions and public events, managing to stir consciences and capture the attention of the global public.

Casa del Contemporaneo is organizing in Sala Assoli from Thursday 16th to Saturday 18th February a three-day event of screenings and meetings entitled The Art of the Real: Milo Rau's Cinema. Three films preceded by three moments of public reflection with representatives of civil society, on wars and democracy, human and environmental rights, migrations and exploitation of the least.

Thursday, February 16, opens the 2014 exhibition “The Moscow Trials,” which documents the project realized by Milo Rau at the Sakharov Center in Moscow. The setting up of a court, with performers who were artists, politicians, religious leaders, real lawyers and a real judge, represents the decade-long series of trials of artists and dissidents undertaken by Vladimir Putin’s government to prevent and put an end to any form of democratic change, culminating in the conviction of the activists of the feminist group Pussy Riot.

Talking about conflicts, democracy and cultural controversies will be the lawyer Elena Coccia and the cultural operator Costanza Boccardi. On Friday 17 February, “The Congo Tribunal” will be screened, filmed in 2017, a unique and shocking transmedia artistic project, in which theatre and cinema become a mirror of horror and a trial is staged to examine the causes and origins of the long civil conflict in Congo, by far the largest and bloodiest economic war in the history of humanity; that Congo recently visited by Pope Francis, at the centre of rapacious interests of the West for its wealth of minerals essential for the technologies of the XNUMXst century.

The task of bringing into focus these atrocities of our time will fall to the director Alessandra Cutolo with experience working in Africa and the environmental lawyer specialized in the protection of human rights Luca Saltalamacchia. Finally, on Saturday 18 February, the last appointment will see the intervention of the Combonian missionary Father Alex Zanotelli and the director and dramaturg of Milo Rau Giacomo Bisordi who will address a great unanswered question: what would Jesus have preached in the 2020st century? At the center of their reflection is the 2019 film “The New Gospel”, shot on the track of The Gospel According to Matthew by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in Matera, European Capital of Culture XNUMX.

The protagonists of the film, which tells the story of the Passion against a contemporary backdrop, are African workers, without documents. A black Jesus leads a revolt in the plantations of Southern Italy and, if all goes as written in the Gospel, dies for our sins. A manifesto for solidarity with the poorest people, it is a cinematic revolt for a more just and humane world.

All the events will start at 19:20 p.m. to leave room, from 1997:XNUMX p.m. onwards, for the images of the films, all subtitled in Italian. Director and playwright born in Bern, Milo Rau studied sociology, German and Romance in Paris, Zurich and Berlin, following, among others, the lessons of Tzvetan Todorov and Pierre Bourdieu. He began writing international reports in XNUMX, traveling to Chiapas and Cuba. His award-winning theatrical and cinematographic works are based on long and meticulous field research, sometimes they are true cultural and social campaigns of great scope.