Honest Raj

Il finish delle figure "Extracted from rolls of 35mm film on which I had made exposures using the photofinish technique. That is, images intended as photography, and therefore as still images. My inclination is to animate [still images] at the very limit of technical impossibility. Scanning these rolls of figures in a state of agitation, shooting one frame at a time, I wanted to extract a film from what was not a film, where frames precisely do not exist and where the process of hand-cranking exposures was indeed equivalent to that of a movie camera, without, however, being a movie camera. Of interest to me was the collision among images dispossessed of sequence, to which the possibility of motion had been given, a motion towards a kinetic narrative, no longer a photographic one, which narrates the end of the images themselves." Paolo Gioli

I volti dell’Anonimo "Faces and figures found on reels of film by an unknown artist from the first few years of the 20th century. I fed the images through what was probably his own movie camera that I had purchased in Rome in 1972. The frames appeared vertically and horizontally, individually and in short sequences and so I allowed them to become superimposed [by rephotographing them in several passes] and dissolves were created naturally by the shutter of the old movie camera due to the speed of manual rephotography, by improvised slowing down or stopping of the camera. To summarize, a movie camera reshoots a movie camera and its viscera through its own gate, creating the animation of an unknown experimental artist." Paolo Gioli

Children "I have always been interested in the sequencing of images in books, where the possibility exists of imposing movement onto still images. Even this brief film takes its departure from the sequencing of a book that is animated but ends with inanimate images. A reflection on a daughter of the assassinated President of the United States and on another little girl: naked and dead, on a heap of peasants murdered on a country road. On the one hand, a life of privilege in a great mansion taken by a great photographer, on the other, death in the dust, taken by a war photographer." Paolo Gioli

Beyond the Night Hanoi 2003. A woman does her hair at night. A train passes between the houses. A crowd rushes by jostling, working. A forgotten child waits.

Embraces The light creates the motion. The film uses black and white as a way to to reveal things. Something is happening here linking death, love and pleasure. Appearance, disappearance, the rhythm of breathing revealing the passing of time both binds and releases our feelings.

Floating Bodies A Japan where time stands still; Men and women bound to their land and their work; Bodies floating in thermal springs, shown through the eyes of a painter. The traveller has understood that "everywhere it is difficult to live" and tries to make a picture from real things, so that, through the act of painting, he no longer suffers. Inspired by the characters in Sôseki's novel "Pillow of Herbs", these references give a free interpretation to the images, so that we make the journey in search of temporary solace.

Winter Journey From "That was..." to "...Did we go there?" The Antarctic approached, observed, scrutinised, analysed, displaced. Questions about reading the landscape, reading motion; A slow motion journey through memory, as if "to have the time at last to know."

Chocolate: The Bitter Tr... While we enjoy the sweet taste of chocolate, the reality is strikingly different for African children. In 2001 consumers around the world were outraged to discover that child labor and slavery, trafficking, and other abuses existed on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, a country that produces nearly half the world's cocoa. An avalanche of negative publicity and consumer demands for answers and solutions soon followed. Two members of US Congress, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa and Representative Eliot Engel of New York, tackled the issue by adding a rider to an agricultural bill proposing a federal system to certify and label chocolate products as slave free. Miki Mistrati and U Roberto Romano launch a behind-the-scenes investigation and verify if these allegations of child labor in the chocolate industry are present today.

The Night of Candles Once a year, the city of Pisa is lit up by thousands of candles for an age-old religious festival. Magic, visions, dreams and light...

Seven Fugitive Images "It's in the idea of movement where, for me, something essential comes together/ combines-- Seven short poems write to each other in images, fleeting visions of China glimpsed through sights, through sounds, always moving." -Robert Cahen.