from ampr.ca

Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) Opens In Vancouver at Vancity Theatre April 1st

“Its view of nature is among the most profound, expansive and unsettling I have ever encountered on film…Mr. Frammartino’s eye for both comedy and mystery produces compositions that are so strange and memorable that they seem to reinvent the very act of perception.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times Winner of the Europa Cinema Label/Best European Film in the Director’s Fortnight section of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, director Michelangelo Frammartino’s LE QUATTRO VOLTE (The Four Times) also met with great acclaim at the Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals.

Said to be inspired by Pythagoras’s belief in four-fold transmigration – by which the soul is passed from human to animal to vegetable to mineral, until completely purified – Frammartino’s poetic, genre-defying film traces the revolving cycles of existence through the daily rituals of life and nature in the beautiful southern Italian region of Calabria.

LE QUATTRO VOLTE unfolds in a gorgeous sequence of long takes, focusing initially on the perspective of an old goatherd (Giuseppe Fuda) who guides his goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes to find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his waterevery day. Quietly succumbing to a long illness during the night— he is progressively reincarnated as a baby goat, a mighty fir tree and, and finally, a lump of coal! Of Calabrian origin himself, Italian artist/filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. Previously a short film director and video installation artist, he has since gone on to direct the award-winning feature The Gift (2003). LE QUATTRO VOLTE is Frammartino’s sophomore film.

Film Schedule: http://www.viff.org/theatre/