Creature, where are you going? (first feature)

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Creature, where are you going? (Creatura dove vai?)

Creature, where are you going? (Creatura dove vai?)

Creature, where are you going? (Creatura dove vai?)

original title:

Creatura dove vai?

cast:

Rosanna Fiumanò, Pino Gargiulo, Bruno Gullace, Clarissa Parisi, Luca Chinaglia, Antonino Fortunato Aloi, Mariapia Gullace

cinematography:

country:

Italy

year:

2019

film run:

54'

format:

4K/DCP - colour

aspect ratio:

4:3

festivals & awards:

Southern Italy.
An old peasant woman on the brink of dementia, the Creature, receives a mysterious visit from a Saint who instructs her to make a pilgrimage to an unknown destination.
The Creature follows his voice and sets off carrying a heavy iron pickaxe.
Before long, the cultured language of the Saint and the ignorance of the Creature create misunderstandings and incomprehension.
The shaky path towards saintliness turns into a “way of the cross”, a tortuous journey during which episodes of deprivation,theft and violence are perpetrated by a rough, primitive people that the Creature meets along her away.
The light of faith begins to falter.
Lost in a metaphysical landscape, the Creature - now devastated - reaches the foothills of an enchanted mountain where a fleeting incarnation of the Saint promises her a future of bliss.
At last the woman has access to that oft-dreamed of Paradise.
But the Saint bestows his grace in mysterious ways.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES:
CREATURE, WHITHER GOEST THOU? sprang from its writers’ desire to recreate an imaginary nineteenth-century Italian South, in which a universe with medieval roots still survived.
The inhabitants of this land led a hard life, in extreme poverty; the hostile climate switched between droughts and heavy flooding; the soil did not produce fruits, the landscape consisted of huge distances to be covered barefoot; the mountains were insuperable barriers. A pagan, animist world, in which Saints, spirit, dragons and witches lived side by side in a single pantheon and possess the ability to morph into animals, plants, natural elements or objects, and participate in human life, like the gods of ancient Greece.
The landscape is seen as a source of divination, mystery and ambiguity.
The Creature encounters figures and characters along the way, who seem to have been created by the landscape itself: the youth, the shepherdess, the man and lastly the little girl, moulded from the same white clay as the mountain.
The ambiguity of the Saint’s message and the stupidity of the Creature give rise to constant misunderstandings that seem to led to miracles in reverse, in which the plundering of the woman and her meagre belongings ends up being a relief and a gift for her tormentors.
This tragicomic parable is created by the mingling of different registers, weaving together biblical, vulgar, fairytale and literary references, attempting to strike an impossible balance between holiness and blasphemy, faith and cynicism, humanity and inhumanity.
The very same blend with which these lands are permeated, promises a future of eternal bliss.