LE PERE DI ADAMO
LE PERE DI ADAMO
Guido Chiesa
Italy / 2007 / 90'
LE PERE DI ADAMO
Guido Chiesa
Italy / 2007 / 90'

Man ate the fruit of the knowledge tree and started to know, learn and separate. Since then his troubles began. He might have avoided many troubles if he had realised that apart from apples, pears also grew on the tree. Early morning, a parade of people protest in the street because the industrialists, trade unions and French government have decided to change their unemployment benefit. An age-old problem, a common image. Their shouting wakes up a funny little man who lives in a comic strip and stands as the central thread of the film. The little man goes to the window and feels that all those people moving around are more or less like a cloud parade. Like the clouds they can bring problems as well as solutions. Like the clouds they come and go and then come back again. It is an eccentric and poetic idea. But for our character it is a challenge of the mind and imagination: can we establish a rigorous, scientific analogy between the social movements and the clouds? The initial consideration that arises from apparently familiar topics (meteorology and politics) overlaps in little explored areas where the apparently separated and distant subjects are in the end quite similar and related: clouds and social movements, rain drops and people, atmospheric disturbances and important social issues. The scientific paradigm that is leading us into this journey is the idea that through reason, experimentation and verification, the human being may know and control nature and whatever is related to it (including human beings). The protagonists of the film, apart from the little man from the comic strip, are people belonging to the movement of “Intermittents” (the French expression that refers to stage hands and showbiz personnel), the temporary workers who in 2003 disrupted the French cultural summer, the Italian meteorologist and climatologist Luca Mercalli and the Scottish mathematician/musician Iain Mc Larty.

Director

Guido Chiesa

Guido Chiesa

Guido Chiesa moved to the United States in 1983 where he made a few shorts. In 1991 he presented his first full-length Il caso Martello at the Venice Film Festival, followed by Babylon (1994). Some of his documentaries are quite intriguing: Materiale resistente (1995), Nascita di una democrazia (1997), Partigiani (1997), Non mi basta mai (1999/2000). In 1998 he directed Una questione privata - Vita di Beppe Fenoglio, and later went back to the works of the great Piedmontese writer with the dramatised version of Il partigiano Johnny (2000), presented at the Venice Film Festival.