Feature film
Beautiful Things
Mybosswas waste
Next: Wave Award
CPH:DOX
Best italian film
74th Venice Film Festival, Arca Jury
Best innovative film
Houston World Film Fest.
Special Jury Prize
Annecy Cinéma Italien
Best Stylistic Achievement
Sima
Best soundtrack
Doker Moscow
Mymovies Award
Shorts IFF.
Beautiful Things is a spectacularly shot documentary with a fugue structure.
Glen Kenny (NY Times)
The particular talent of Giorgio on display here is a kind of synesthesia, making music into images rather than using music to enhance images.
Stephanie Zacherek (Time Magazine)
Like any good symphonist, Ferrero knows the power of silence; the soundtrack makes room for dead spots that suggest a world scraped clean of all the clutter.
David Bordwell (Critic, Professor Emeritus of Film Studies)
“I watched Beautiful Things right away and very much liked it. The combination of sophisticated music and fantastic cinematography was wonderful. I truly enjoyed it.
Stefan Sagmeister
The editing of the film is impressive, as the sequences overlap at some points, mirroring the way that music is often brought in early to transition scenes in movies.
Cineuropa
“A visionary work that during the last Venice Film Festival left the lagoon with wide open eyes and closed mouth.”
Fabrique du cinéma
One of the best debuts of the last years.
Nonsolocinema
A stunning visual symphony on the objects and on the process of dishumanization of the man of grandiose visionary power. One of the best movie of the 74th Mostra del Cinema. A miracle maybe.
Quinlan
Beautiful Things by Giorgio Ferrero really marvels at your insight. An audiovisual and punk song, a sonata for multiple perceptions, from unexpected musical trends. To audio-watch abandoned to evasion.
Uzak
SYNOPSIS
Van is a floorhand, the maintenance man on an oil rig. He works in the desert, at a large oilfield in Texas. Danilo is the chief engineer of a freighter. He spends all his days in the heart of the vessel where a humongous engine resides. Andrea is a scientist. He has lived his whole life between mathematical formulae and the silence of the anechoic chamber. Vito has spent half of his life looking after slot machines. Today he is in charge of an immense reinforced-concrete pit for waste. These men, unwittingly, provide the basis for the whole sequence of creation, transport, marketing and destruction of the objects that feed our bulimic lifestyle. The objects that we think we need every day begin and end their journey inside isolated and eerie industrial and scientific locations. These men are monks in temples of steel and concrete and carry out the same mechanical rituals every day in silence and solitude, sharing the space with their own phantoms. She and He are an ordinary couple. They have spent their life accumulating stuff to the point of saturation. They grew up in the boom years of commercial television, and they are the first generation to have been freed from it by the internet. Today they are in their forties and are looking for a way out. She and He are us. And we have never heard about them.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
This movie is dedicated to ourselves who could not endure a life without collecting useless objects, to ourselves, bulimic of plastics and noises and afraid of silence. It’s dedicated to ourselves who fall asleep with Netflix in our ears hoping that night might fall without notice, to us, who accept the idea that life can go before but not that objects can survive us. This film is a way of dispelling our lifestyle from which we can not escape in any way.
Project team
Written and directed by
Giorgio Ferrero
Director of photography
and Co-director
Federico Biasin
Sound&Music
Giorgio Ferrero e Rodolfo Mongitore
Filming and Editing
Giorgio Ferrero, Federico Biasin, Enrico Aleotti, Filippo Vallegra
Produced by
MYBOSSWAS
Main cast
Van Quattro (Usa)
Danilo Tribunal (Philippines)
Andrea Pavoni Belli (Italy)
Vito Mirizzi (Switzerland)
Vittoria De Ferrari Sapetto (Italy)
Andrea Valfrè (Italy)
Partners
Film Commission Torino
Regione Piemonte
Db technologies
Odessa city – texas
Grimaldi Lines
Università degli studi di Ferrara
Azienda Cantonale dei Rifiuti
Le Gru
Klepierre
Collegio Einaudi
Edi Milano
Universal Robots
Visual Pro 360
Quercetti
Ombra di Foglia
Web development
Daniele Morano
Beatiful things is a journey into our consumption ‘bulimia’. The many objects we accumulate and we believe to be essential begin their production cycle in silent secluded industrial and scientific sites. Van, Danilo, Andrea and Vito are monks inside temples of send, steel and concrete. They repeat the same liturgy every day. We don’t even know that they exist. Van, Danilo, Andrea and Vito for the first time will be able to meet and look virtually in the face of the audience to whom they have devoted a whole life of work.
The film was written and directed with a musical approach, like a score where notes and images are conceived together. Words, music, sounds are part of the same language and carry a single symphonic tale The very short slice of daily life that opens every act is the photograph of our life, our home, our terrace, our objects, our melancholy. This film is a way of escaping a lifestyle from which we can find no way out. In the film we have tried to express all our sadness, the urgency of the need to go back to breathing in silence, free from the constriction of a life swallowed up by noise.
This is our howl and we have tried to turn it into a song.
