A revisiting of Kafka's novel "The Castle", in which the Castle becomes the former Trieste asylum, whose walls of confinement were first opened by Franco Basaglia. A Castle experienced and re-imagined by one of its former guests, Pavel Berdon, an ex-patient of the asylum who has taken over the camera and sends mysterious video letters to his former mentor, Giovanni Cioni. Like Kafka's surveyor 'K.', Cioni tries to decipher the messages coming from Pavel and the Castle. A kind of transmutation from Kafka's tale thus takes place: the Castle is the asylum, but beyond the asylum, the Castle is the whole world and we are all inhabitants of this vision. Everyone is waiting for a messenger to finally reveal who they are. Franco Basaglia opened the walls of the asylum to the world, but perhaps that was not enough; we have yet to open the boundaries of our identity, in a vertigo of the Other...

The film is, or would be, a Castle revisited – but here the film itself becomes the Castle, in the sense that we enter the film as the protagonist K. arrives at the border village, summoned by the silent Castle. In this transformation, the film takes on its own dimension, which is that of identity, of the Other, of the vertigo of the Other. A project inspired by the Castle but not an adaptation. A reading key. A game proposal, made to the people involved, that allows a search for boundaries, identity, normality – rather than a metaphor. Using fiction to go beyond the normative boundary of the gaze, which assigns categories instead of looking at the human being, at oneself. It is customary to say that one makes a film of the real with the protagonists. Here it is an overcoming and a fulfilment of the device. I make a film with Pavel in a creative exchange, an exchange that is also a challenge, an overcoming.

Director
Giovanni Cioni
Story
Giovanni Cioni
Screenplay
Giovanni Cioni
Director of photography
Giovanni Cioni, Pavel Berdon
Altri credits

Selene Silvestri (Amministratrice di produzione).

Cast and characters

Pavel Berdon, Guillermo Giampietro, Lara Baraccetti, Giovanni Cioni

Production Director
Giovanni Zaninotto
Producer
Production
GraffitiDoc, Tag Film
con il sostegno di Film Commission Torino Piemonte - Piemonte Doc Film Fund - sviluppo dicembre 2023
Assistente di produzione
Cindy Juglair
Last update: 04 March 2024