Paolo Cossi, Jacopo Elia, Denise Trombin, Nicola Lanza
Italian artist Michelangelo Frammartino’s award-winning follow-up to his visionary Le Quattro Volte (2010) depicts a real-life 1961 expedition into an incredible system of caves.
During the economic boom of the ‘60s, Europe’s highest building is being built in Italy’s prosperous North. Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, young speleologists explore Europe’s deepest cave in the untouched Calabrian hinterland, reaching the bottom of the Bifurto Abyss, 700 metres deep, for the first time. The intruders’ venture is unnoticed by the inhabitants of a nearby village, but not by the solitary old shepherd of the Pollino plateau, whose hermitic life begins to interweave with the group’s own journey.
Another work of captivating, near mystical beauty from Frammartino, pitched somewhere between a drama and a documentary study of the mysteries of organic life and nature, Il buco chronicles an investigation into the unknown depths of the world and parallels two great voyages to the interior. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Venice 2021.
