The first DOC rendez-vous for the 2017/2018 season will present Safari by Ulrich Seidl, at last on Italian screens.

Following the summer break, the customary monthly rendez-vous dedicated to lovers of reality cinema is back again, proposing Ulrich Seidl’s new film titled Safari this month, in which the author, as usual, continues to explore the most obscene aspects of contemporary society, concentrating this time on safaris by rich Westerners.

Presented last year out of competition at the Venice film Festival, this film, distributed by Lab80, is finally hitting Italian screens. Seidl, one of the most controversial and provoking filmmakers within the European scenario, is also the author, among other films, of Hundstage (Dog days, 2001) and of the Paradies (Paradise) trilogy (2012-2013), also programmed at the Massimo during the past season. Admission 6.00/4.00/3.00 euro.

Ulrich Seidl

Safari

(Austria/Denmark/Germany 2016, 90’, DCP, col., o.v. it. s/t.)

Wealthy Austrian and German hunters kill big mammals inside the reservations on the border between Namibia and South Africa. The filmmaker follows them during their hunting trips and gets them to talk about the sense of venery activities, of their relationship with the African continent, about life and death. Similarly to his former Im Keller (In the basement), Safari is a journey through ordinary men and women’s psychologies and ways of being, albeit taken up with activities that are extravagant, and absolutely unthinkable for most of us. Safari is not a film about hunting. And neither is it a denounciation documentary. But it is, in the style of this Austrian filmmaker, a take about reality, on which the camera eye imparts a tragic-comical vein and in which the act of showing all the details of the world it is documenting without censoring them, becomes a precise choice in style, full of significance.