TURIN. “I better not explain it, otherwise you take me for mad”, laughs Davide Maldi when the chat hasn’t even started yet. He knows that the new short film presented this afternoon at Casa Mollino, as a special event of the Torino Film Festival, is destined to make people discuss and divide. So, to understand, it is better to start from the beginning and tell who are (indeed, who they were) Father Murphy, the musical duo at the center of «171219 – May Them White Rise With You».
The group founded by the brothers Freddie Murphy and Chiara Lee (who brothers are not in life) has for twenty years trod the paths of the Italian occult psychedelia, achieving success especially abroad. He from Treviso, she from Ivrea, both in Turin, on 17 December 2018 they decided to dissolve their artistic partnership. Then, in 2019, videomakers Davide Maldi and Micol Roubini involved in a new project: on 17 December, exactly one year after the end of Father Murphys, all four spent a night in the splendid, dark home of the architect Mollino, filmed during a sort of mediumistic session.
«The work is a dedication to two musicians that both Micol and I were fans of. In 2014 I called them to act as a band in my first film “Frastuono”, two years ago I wanted them for the soundtrack of “The apprenticeship” and Micol did the same in his “The road to the mountains”. After these collaborations they asked us to help them commemorate the spirit of the group that they themselves had decided to kill. Through this video they wanted to try to convey a last farewell to the public, to whom they had said goodbye with a simple concert ».
If this already appears singular, the modalities of the event are even more so. Screened in the same place where it was shot, at the Casa Mollino Museum (in Via Napione 2), the short will be visible only to six spectators at a time for five screenings in all: at 15, 15.45, 16. 30, 17 15, 18. Those who fail to book at 328 7403872 will be able (more prosaically) to retrieve it from room 2 of the Cinema Massimo, today at 11. 15 and tomorrow at 21. 30. Then the short will disappear from circulation for a long, perhaps very long time .
“The idea is that that video will emerge from time to time, when the soul of the band decides to appear,” explains Maldi. “It could be in ten years, or maybe twenty. Not being cinema in the strict sense of the term, it will follow a logic of musical cult. On the other hand, if a band decides to close its path, it is not right that the members show themselves constantly ».
The experience of that “night at the museum” was unforgettable for filmmakers and musicians. All the more so for the location, a jewel little known to the Turinese themselves. «The policy in its management is not to be totally open to the world and to do little advertising, so it can be hidden. For Mollino it was a point of communication between life and death, a mystical place where he met with friends to seek contact with the afterlife. The house was built and furnished to convey this feeling and everything in there has a symbolism, for example there is a carpet of zebra skin whose black line on the back points towards the window, which in turn overlooks the Po. they said there were energies moving in there and I swear we felt them that night. So – laughs Maldi again – was I right to say that you would have taken me for a madman? “. –
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