During the journeys, the light vehicles of Pippo Delbono's cinema capture unique moments, ordinary or extraordinary encounters. From a hotel room in Paris to another in Budapest, from Istanbul to Bucharest, the routes weave together a fabric of the contemporary world. Its witnesses, some famous, some not, say or dance their vision of the universe. The encounters (with his mother, friends, strangers) are so many images of the world of yesterday, today, tomorrow. A world that someone tells through music (like the composer and violinist Alexander Balanescu) or gesture (like Marie-Agnès Gillot, Étoile de l'Opéra dancer in Paris), or through words (like the actress Irène Jacob) or silence (like Bobò, Delbono's historic deaf-mute actor, like the artist Sophie Calle or the actress Marisa Berenson). Sometimes the camera works secretly. Sometimes he films the moments preceding a catastrophe – like the earthquake in L'Aquila. Or the aftermath, as in Birkenau. Unrepeatable and authentic moments, which Pippo Delbono's eyes look at while walking. Then they stop, slow down, search, they are unsure, they discover. From one image to another, from one text to another, from one space to another, the camera speaks to us about love. Of poetry. And some meat. With what it entails of passion, shadow, pain, tragedy and humor.
Pippo Delbono, author, actor, director, was born in Varazze in 1959. In the 1980s he began studying dramatic art in a traditional school which he left following his meeting with Pepe Robledo, an Argentine actor from Libre Teatro Libre (a theater group active in South America in the 1970s that used collective creation as a means of expression and denunciation of the dictatorship in Argentina). Together they moved to Denmark and joined the Farfa group, directed by Iben Nagel Rasmussen, historical actress of the Odin Teatret and for Delbono an alternative path began in search of a new theatrical language. Delbono dedicates himself to the study of the principles of oriental theater which he deepens in subsequent stays in India, China and Bali, where the central focus is the actor's meticulous and rigorous work on the body and voice. In 1987 he created his first show, The Time of Assassins and in the same year he met Pina Bausch who invited him to participate in one of the works of her Wuppertaler Tanztheater. This extraordinary occasion marks a fundamental stage in the director's artistic career. Delbono's shows are not productions of theatrical texts but total creations, the actors are part of a nucleus that maintains and grows over time. Already in the first work the features of a unique theatrical lexicon are defined which represents the peculiarity of all subsequent creations.