Director’s Statement

“Dark things are drawn to brighter, bodies thin away in a flowing of colors, colors in music. so disappearance is the venture of ventures ”

- Montale, “Portami il Girasole…”

“Filthy Beatniks are out to make it rich.”

- Donovan, “Season of the Witch”

The scene unfolds in my father’s Marrakech Sienna Red Villa. I’m soon 18 and getting high on the smell of térébenthine, painting in the shade of a patio after breakfast—then sliding into a sofa in the rich company of neorealist Italian cinema recorded on black VHS cassettes rolling in the player of a fat metal grey VCR until late afternoon. Later, after dinner, tales from the sixties or pre-revolution Iran would unroll—broken dreams from those golden years ceaselessly revisited by the fire over tea served very hot in very tiny Persian glasses. A tape of Bloomfield, Cooper & Stills’ cover of "Season of the Witch" plays somewhere in the background.

The mood encapsulates the way I see this trip: a non-linear narrative flow of poetic fabric layering medium and frame to possible pasts, presents, and futures.

I feel we have stopped pushing the envelope; we’ve long given up the quest—wrapped up in the uber-individualist virtual reassurance of market hyper-normalization. Let’s contemplate the hypothesis that times actually revolve and explore themes related to reconnection. Here lies the underlying idea of the film: to bridge into Gen Z’s yearning for genuine experiential life sequences, offering an immersive multidisciplinary contemporary art approach to an atemporal conduit between pasts and presents, sparking the rethinking of futures.

My set of characters solidified organically through the years, stemming from a first outline of the storyline in the early 2000s—taking in locations for the shoot of a road doc in Morocco, trailing Essaouira’s Gnawa brotherhood with my friend Laurent Tangy behind the lens. (We promised each other it would have to be done, so here we are). The cosmopolitan mystique of Paul Bowles and Somerset Maugham inspired my lead characters; the last days of Jimi Hendrix, my father’s stories, and my love for Antonioni's "Blow-Up" provided the necessary substance for the backdrop.

Finally, yes, Donovan’s song always was the project title. The theme of the song says it all: a dark spell followed the brief enlightenment of the sixties. Can we break it?

Palazzo Dandolo, Venice Sep 29th, 2025