Terra Nova. The Land of Long Shadows
Competition                   

Terra Nova. The Land of Long Shadows

Lorenzo Pallotta

Antarctica (1988): a ship must escape from the grip of the ice to reach Terra Nova Bay. The Italian icebreaker Laura Bassi, in 2023, follows the same route and reaches the southernmost point on the planet ever reached by a ship.

 

 

«We chose to tell the story of this extreme journey from archival material, which is the backbone of the film. This approach to two different types of material allowed us to experiment with various formats and sounds, amplifying the visual and aural aspects to offer the viewer a deeply emotional experience in a remote, dangerous, and as yet little-explored place.

We want to engage the viewer in the concept of “evolutionary tension” intrinsic to the journey and the route. At the heart of this epic undertaking, we deliberately kept the concept of the impossibility of mastering nature.

We carefully curated the sound and visual aspects to immerse the room and the individual viewer inside a “simulator.” All this to be on board with the crew during the most critical moments. The use of a Handycam camera from the 1990s was chosen to bring the two distinct historical periods, 1988 and 2023, as close as possible. This approach allows the narrative to navigate through radio communications, making the viewer feel as if he or she were inside a spaceship. The goal of this whole process is to return the human being to a primal state of discovery, endurance and fear.»

– Lorenzo Pallotta

Information

Country

Italy

Year

2023

Length

53'

Category

Documentary / Experimental

Origin of archival materials

Anonymous Film collection, (ENEA - Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development), 1988

Editing

Massimo Da Re, Marco Capozzi, Lorenzo Pallotta

Music

Freddy Murphy, Chiara Lee

Sound design

Tommaso Barbaro

Sound editing and mix

Agit Utlu, Luca Canzano

Sound post-production

Fullcode

Distribution

Lights On

Director’s biography

Lorenzo Pallotta was born in 1992.
Inumanamente, his first short film was selected in 2016 at the Milano Film Festival, while his short film Luis (2019) was selected, among others, at Festival Europeen du film court de Brest, Figari Film Fest, Visioni Italiane. Las Hadas (2021) had its world premiere at the FEST- New Directors New Film Festival in Portugal.
Sacro moderno, Lorenzo Pallotta’s first feature-length documentary, was presented at Alice nella Città 2021.