The Italian Cultural Institute of Sydney is pleased to confirm also for its 2024 edition the by-now consolidated collaboration with the Antenna Documentary Film Festival. The Festival returns this year with an extremely rich and varied programming that includes 52 compelling films that celebrate the life stories of famous artists, delve into the world’s most pressing conflicts, explore uncharted realms in the virtual universe, probe mysterious dramas that are all the stranger because they are real.
More than a decade old, the collaboration between Antenna and the Institute has over the years seen the participation of some of the best documentary feature films by Italian directors or produced in Italy, among which Giovanni Totaro’s Happy Winter, winner of the 2018 edition, stands out.
For this edition of Antenna, the Institute supports the Festival for the screening of the recent documentary.
Pure Unknown: Every night in the autopsy room where she works, Dr. Cristina Cattaneo, forensic doctor and professor at the University of Milan, meets what she calls “Pure Strangers” — people who in life were on the margins of society and who in death could not take with them the memory of a name or a story. People who left behind those who could have given them back an identity, bodies without a name. Pure Strangers belong to the margins of society. They are homeless, prostitutes, runaway teenagers. In recent years mainly migrants, rejected from the Mediterranean Sea onto the Italian coasts. And what happens when the dead have lost their identity? Faced with this growing multitude, no one seems to care about their right to dignity. Directors Cicogna and Colombo follow Cattaneo in the ethical battle that brought her before the European Parliament to ask that the right to a name be recognized as such. Taking care of the dead is a responsibility that society must shoulder in order not to fall into the abyss of indifference.
Information and bookings: https://antennafestival.org/