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By Michelangelo FRAMMARTINO

NEW HORIZONS INT'L FILM FESTIVAL / NEW HORIZONS ASSOCIATION - as DISTR Theatrical, VOD, POLAND / FEST / PROMO

Experimental - Completed 2021

Festivals
& Awards

Venice - Biennale 2021

Special Jury Prize

- Year of production
- 2021
- Genres
- Experimental, Environmental, True Story
- Countries
- FRANCE, ITALY, GERMANY
- Languages
- ITALIAN
- Duration
- 93 mn
- Director(s)
- Michelangelo FRAMMARTINO
- Synopsis
- Special Jury Prize winner at the Venice Film Festival, The Hole is a film by the maker of the memorable The Four Times (Audience Award at the 10th NH). After a decade of silence, the director returns to Calabria to explore its cave systems, which are among the deepest in the world. But although he recalls a former speleological expedition, he is interested in another dimension of underground escapades. The hole in the ground, leading to hidden labyrinths, is a kind of gate to Hades, an entrance to the kingdom of the dead, around which an old, sick shepherd circles every day. Time slowly condenses on the walls of the caves, and the billions of years old existence of the planet seems eternal in comparison with the fragile existence of what hesitates and passes in a flash on its thick shell: animals, trees, people and their stories. The director has filled The Hole with deep, spiritual content, the beauty of nature and the moving fate of the shepherd written on his face. Frommartino’s docufiction is a masterful example of meditative, focused slow cinema. No wonder Xan Brooks of „The Guardian” called it the cinematic equivalent of a hermit on a mountaintop.