| Director: | Stefano Knuchel |
|---|---|
| Production: | Fiumi Film (Vittoria Fiumi), RSI (Giulia Fazioli), CONG SA (Patrizia Zanotti, Graziella Lacidogna) |
| Running Time: | 100’ |
| Language: | Italian, French, Venetian dialect |
| Country: | Switzerland |
| Main Cast: | Hugo Pratt, Patrizia Zanotti, Dominique Petitfaux, Thierry Thomas, Marco Steiner (as themselves) |
| Screenplay: | Stefano Knuchel |
| Cinematographer: | Ariel Salati |
| Editor: | Stefano Knuchel |
| Music: | Stefano Knuchel, Zeno Gabaglio, Niton |
| Sound: | Tommaso Dugato |
Cinema
Il desiderio di essere inutile - Hugo a Venezia
Special Screenings
Synopsis
A journey through Venice, the Pacific Ocean and Switzerland retraces Hugo Pratt’s life as an initiatory path shaped by memory, myth and water. Or perhaps that life was merely a dream of Corto Maltese? Crossing lagoons, oceans and inner landscapes, the film explores storytelling as a passage between visible and invisible worlds.
Director’s Statement
Like many people, my imagination was shaped by reading Hugo Pratt. I later discovered that his life was as fascinating as the stories he told. This discovery gave rise to a project that stayed with me for almost twenty years: tracing three defining moments in his life through three films. Il desiderio di essere inutile – Hugo a Venezia marks the culmination of this journey. I did not want to make a biography, but to seek the origins of his vision. To do so, I explored forgotten archives, restored scattered materials, and followed Pratt’s traces across several countries. I tried to allow mystery to remain part of the story. For this reason, the film combines rigorous research with a free-form approach, one that does not claim to explain an author, but rather seeks to enter into dialogue with his imaginative world.
