Terra Nova. The Land of Long Shadows

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