Drama, romantic, by Michele Senesi, Italy, 2020.
A man is driving home on his birthday but gets distracted by watching a beautiful girl jogging on the side of the road and ends up off the road. The accident is terrible: he finds himself with a piece of the beer bottle he was drinking stuck in his mouth, his bloodied face full of glass fragments, his feet amputated. He can't move, can't speak, and ended up in a clearing where it's hard to be found. His wife waits for him at home to celebrate his birthday, in vain. Among surreal visions and perceptions, even the last contacts of the unfortunate motorist with the world go away: the smartphone goes off, the radio with the grotesque local broadcasts leaves him. And he also discovers that next to him is the corpse of the girl who was jogging.

After the previous ensemble film - with an enormous quantity of locations, editing and actors - director Michele Senesi chooses to work in a totally new way: few locations, 3 protagonists, dilated rhythm, attention to suggestions and atmospheres, with a work macroscopic on the power of the home run. Hidden inside a "film genre" surface is an avant-garde film that takes us back to the extraordinary visual and rhythmic inventions of the 1920s. "The Circle of Snails" is an example of the potential of independent cinema and of the possibility of cinematographic art to explore the territories of figurative art, in stark contrast to the standard narrative of mainstream cinema products made up of characters, the development of a story , dialogues, conflicts between good and evil. It is an almost silent film, full of extravagant and amusing visual inventions, but with an intense existential drama that develops silently under the surface of images and irony. The newspaper "Il manifesto" writes: "By reducing almost everything to a location, the director manages to build a motionless, silent (anti)thriller. He is therefore forced to claim the power of the image, its primordial essence: always moving on the limit of the farce and the insane, distinctive traits of his own expressive poetics, Senesi does not limit himself to sketching a "delusional" film. He films a delirium. He reduces the entire existence of the average man to a near-death swoon, made up of encounters/clashes , of memories, of suggestions, of uncontrolled hypotheses". One of the best Italian films, and not only, of recent years.

Biography of the director - Senesi Michele
Senesi is the founder of the PALONERO film production company (feature films: Bumba Atomika, feature film production: I REC U), engaged in the creation of independent audiovisual products with an authorial imprint. Publisher and Professor (Macerata Academy of Fine Arts), he is the co-founder of AsianFeast.org, one of the world's longest-running and content-rich websites. Since 2003 he has been studying and disseminating Asian cinema and culture. He has contributed to dozens of magazines, festivals, newspapers, books, websites and conferences.

LANGUAGE: Italian
SUBTITLES: English