YIDFF 2019 Closing Film
Angela’s Diaries: Two Filmmakers
I diari di Angela—Noi due cineasti-
ITALY / 2018 / Italian, Russian, Armenian, French, English / Color / Digital File / 125 min
Directors, Producers: Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi
Script: Yervant Gianikian
Sound: Massimo Mariani
Editing: Yervant Gianikian, Luca Previtali
Production Company: Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucci’s Private Archive
Source: Yervant Gianikian
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi worked together making films for over forty years. After Ricci Lucchi passed away in February 2018, Gianikian re-read her diary. Almost every day had an entry, accompanied by her illustrations, recording everything: public and private events, meetings, and books she read, trips to Russia, Iran, Armenia, people she met through film with him, as well as screenings and audience reactions. This film is a mixture of the diary’s text and images, in addition to 8mm films and video tapes in which we see their day-to-day life. Their personal history blends with their artistic approach, proof of their uncompromised stance towards art and love for life.
For Angela Ricci Lucchi
The filmed materials and even the diaries tell about our private life first of all, they reveal what we lived while we made films about violence, colonialism, hunting: a description of the world as the First World War appeared (From the Pole to the Equator). The recordings of daily life while epoch-making events were taking place were central to our journey, and in those years, from 1989 to 1991, we were in Russia, and in the Caucasus (Men, Years, Life). In the film there is the essence of our mission, that promise made to Angela is here, and it shines through the passionate writing of her pages, which without any barrier have crossed the narrow and dark eye of the violent world.
Both Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi were born in 1942. Gianikian, born in Italy to Armenian parents, studied architecture in Venice. Ricchi Lucchi was born in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna and studied painting in Austria under Oskar Kokoschka. The two began to produce films in the late 1970’s, based in Milan. Searching the nooks and crannies of archives, they would collect found footage, dyeing and re-editing it, producing many works on the wars of the early 20th century and colonialism. In 2015 they were awarded the FIAF Award from the International Federation of Film Archives. They have held a large-scale retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and have screened in special programs around the world. Among their most famous works are From the Pole to the Equator (1986) and Prisoners of War (1995). Ricci Lucci passed away in 2018. A sequel to this film titled Angela’s Diaries: Two Filmmakers. Chapter Two screened at the 2019 Venice Film Festival.