Ben Donateo
Locarno Residency 2023 | Switzerland
Locarno Residency 2023 | Switzerland
Ben Donateo is a filmmaker from Switzerland. His latest short film Lorem Ipsum world premiered at the 75th edition of the Locarno Film Festival. Previously Burnt. Land of Fire was also selected for the Locarno Film Festival, IDFA 2020 and other film festivals. In 2021, he participated in the 2nd Film Accelerator, “Werner Herzog: filming a strange planet” and later in L’immagine e la parola tutored by Michelangelo Frammartino. After being part of the 2021 IDFA Academy, he was selected for the Sundance Institute Collab. on film marketing strategies scheduled for Spring 2022. He was born in Switzerland in 1988. After studying filmmaking in Los Angeles, he attended the Sapienza University of Rome where he founded D.R.C. Creativity Productions, a cultural association for film enthusiasts.
2020 Burnt. Land of Fire
2021 Burnt. Boring Portrait of an Angry, Young, Black Man
2022 Lorem Ipsum
Production: Rough cat
On the island of Everything, everything is circular; it has a beginning, a path and an end. Below sea level, along the perimeter of the coast, shoals of tuna swim convulsively through cold currents. On the surface life is slow, and is marked by delicate and redundant sounds. At midnight the heels of an exhausted woman pierce the silence of the crickets. At dawn a small radio coughs intermittently, tied to the stern of a boat and cradled by the morning waves. At noon, a group of street urchins cycle over golden hills looking for the locust colony, while a British couple have lunch on the side of a volcano with no kitchen. It’s the day of the “Tonnara”, the annual slaughter of tuna. But it is also the day in which the inhabitants of this story discover that they, in turn, are turning into tuna.
Our way of living will conduct us to death, no matters what. It's about people who keep swimming in circle just like tuna, ending up in a fishing net.
