There is the cinema that claims to show everything, gets tangled up in words and ultimately says nothing. Then there is the cinema that does not use words and does not tell stories, but is capable of revealing more than one secret of the world and of life. Michelangelo Frammartino's cinema belongs to this second small family. After the notable Il dono, in his second feature film the young Milanese director chooses to take the viewer into unknown territories, freeing him from the tyranny of the story. A film without a story but with four protagonists: a shepherd, a goat, a tree and then coal. It is forbidden to say more, if one does not want to run the risk of spoiling such a crystalline and delicate work. "A daring film, made of silences and contemplation, simple as an ancient nursery rhyme but also mysterious and exciting as a science fiction epic". "Archaic, beautiful and different from all the others", a show that is difficult to forget, which replaces the false truths of proclamations in the form of cinema with ecstatic contemplation. The audience at the last Cannes Film Festival noticed this, giving Frammartino’s film a vibrant and emotional welcome. As international critics recalled, “the new Michelangelo of Italian cinema has been born”.
Michelangelo Frammartino was born in Milan in 1968. In 1991 he enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic, a context in which he developed an interest in the relationship between the concrete and constructed spaces of living and the presence of photographic, cinematographic or video images. In 1997 he graduated in directing at the Civica Scuola del Cinema and continued his own experimentation with images. Since 2005 he has taught Directing Institutions at the University of Bergamo. His productions include: o non posso entrare (2002, winner at the Bellaria Festival), Il dono (2003, awarded at Annecy, Thessaloniki, Belfort, Mons, Tiburon, Spalato, Bellaria, Warsaw), Le quattro volte (2010, previewed at the Cannes Film Festival, awarded at the festivals of Cannes, Monaco, Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna, Bobbio, Annecy, Reykjavík).