Lost and Beautiful

Pietro Marcello's 2015 Italian film stands between documentary and fable. Tommaso Cestrone is a shepherd who spent years voluntarily guarding an abandoned Bourbon palace in Campania, a region poisoned by the mafia and the burning of refuse, where nobody cared about the building. After Marcello began filming him, Tommaso died of a heart attack and the film changed shape. What follows moves into fiction: Pulcinella, the mask of Neapolitan tradition, is sent to earth to fulfil the dead man's last wish and tries to take Sarchiapone, the young buffalo Tommaso looked after, north. The buffalo speaks as narrator. The film relates what Italy has done to its own land in the form of a lament. It won prizes at Locarno. Who it's for: viewers who like experimental documentary and poetic cinema. Who it's not for: anyone expecting a straight account; the film keeps changing form.