THE CITY BEAUTIFUL
TEASER
How did the project come about?
The project started a bit like in a Hollywood movie at a bar, together with two other guys: one a director, the other a boom operator, and me as the director of photography and camera operator. It was a fully self-produced endeavor. After coming up with the story we wanted to tell, we set off for northern India for the next two months, from the deserts of Rajasthan to the mountains of Uttarakhand. We passed through remote villages, following the course of the Ganges River, all the way to Varanasi a deeply sacred place for Hindu Indians, where people go to be 'purified'.
The project
The City Beautiful is a journey dedicated to those who step outside themselves and the world to which they belong. A unanimous feeling that guides us to observe from other perspectives a world so far and so near. The journey begins in Chandigarh, a city designed by French architect Le Corbusier in 1951. Its structure represents a human body, a metaphor for the architect himself, immersed in a new and distant world. He built the city already aware of its transience, of the impossibility of imagining and planning for the future. This limitation is the great gift he left to his next heirs, to create a mortal city capable of dying and being reborn so as to be able to respond to today without forgetting ing tomorrow. His vision is the impetus that drives us out of this city, inspiring us to step out of his body to try to understand the unknown into which he has plunged.
Prologue
The first step is the city’s suburbs, amorphous places on the edge of the planned city, working-class housing estates and shantytowns sprouting up on the edges of roads. Here we give space and voice to a group of olunteers who spring from these realities and tell us what they do and why. The end of the prologue is ictated by their advice, get out of this city to get to know India, follow the river Ganges to try to understand what it epresents in this faraway world.