Fireworks burst into the sky above Texas – perceived light years away from the idyllic town where 14-year-old Sara is growing up as the oldest daughter of a large family of goat farmers. She takes tender care of the animals and the manufacture of various dairy products; helps raise her siblings who are home-schooled like her – according to a strict interpretation of the bible. Nearby, cowboys from the neighbourhood organise rodeos, showing us an America we have long believed forgotten. Sara’s inner conflict between her subtle attraction to the young bull-rider Colby and her future as a devout wife emerges almost imperceptibly.
The great lucidity of the narrative culminates as a child slips out of the mother’s womb in front of Sara’ eyes, confronting her directly with her destiny. The camera “breathes” incredibly close to the protagonists, capturing that inner turmoil in tender pastels. It makes the heart pound so hard that Sara’s mother can only pray for it to finally stop going crazy.

Claudia Lehmann

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Golden Dove International Competition Documentary Film 2013

History is what happened in the past, they say. It can be portrayed as a longitudinal or latitudinal section. Some imagine it longish, others like a pile. Italian director Giovanni Donfrancesco sees history as a branching network of living veins that reach into the present. One of these veins links Carrara in the Apuan Alps to the American city of Barre. In the early 20th century, many impoverished Italian marble cutters and sculptors moved across the Atlantic to the granite quarries of Vermont where they hoped to find a better life. But you don’t get old when you work in a quarry. Within a short time many work migrants died of silicosis, also known as black lung. During the 1930s depression, writers interviewed the Barre stone cutters to integrate their oral testimony in the great project of the Roosevelt administration to draw a picture of America in the era of the Great Depression. Donfrancesco’s project has the same titanic dimensions: he combines narratives of Barre’s former inhabitants, spoken in the voices of its present residents, in a powerful succession of images and sounds that becomes a veritable fresco of multilayered individual and social realities – somewhere between deprivation and pride, personal tragedy and utopian hopes.
Ralph Eue