Based on a tragic true story, Balentes is a strikingly beautiful animated feature from veteran Sardinian independent film-maker Giovanni Columbu, a haunting echo from history clothed in magnificent monochrome graphics that borrow self-consciously from the visual grammar and early experimental techniques of silent cinema. Columbu has a background in architecture and fine art, which helps explain why this meticulously hand-crafted piece of artisan cinema would be equally at home in an art gallery as in a movie theatre. But it also a powerful piece of storytelling, shot through with the fatalistic melodrama of a classic western, a timeless folk ballad, or even a Biblical parable. While the uncompromising style will mostly have specialist appeal, this exquisite audio-visual poem deserves to find a wider audience following its international festival premiere in Rotterdam next week.
Balentes takes place in rural Sardinia in 1940, with Mussolini ruling Italy and World War II in its early stages. Two young men, Ventura (voiced by Bruno Sedda) and Michele (Andrea Sedda), hatch a romantically naïve scheme to liberate a small herd of horses from a military stud farm, thus saving them from being transported to the frontline and almost certain death. The pair’s mission is initially a success, and they gallop off to freedom with the hoses. But they are betrayed and ambushed, with Ventura dying in the clash. Columbu tells this story in a non-linear manner, scrambling timelines into an impressionistic montage, exploring how these events have a ripple effect on friends and family, police and local officials, inviting condemnation and dark speculation across a wider community.
The title of Balentes derives from a Sardinian word that denotes reckless desire for adventure, which has both positive and negative connotations. Columbu based the story on true events that he first heard about from his maternal grandmother, a distant relative of the real boy who was killed over the horse theft. A young woman at the time, she worked in the town where his body was taken for burial, and was summoned to identify him in the snowy cemetery, a scene recreated in the film.
Columbu does not overplay the fascist historical context, but there are glimpses of Mussolini in the mix, plus a sense of rural innocence meeting military-industrial brutality when Ventura is gunned down by hooded militia men. Indeed, the film strongly hints he was killed in cold blood in a staged gunfight after surviving the initial ambush.
The strongest selling point for Balentes is its highly original, consistently dazzling visual style. Columbu revisits and reinvents techniques from the early days of cinema, overlaying hand-drawn and hand-painted monochrome backdrops with characters animated using vintage rotoscope methods that lend them an air of photorealistic movement, even when their forms are rendered as shadowy silhouettes and transparent phantoms.
Some sequences appear to recycle actual archive newsreel, heavily remixed into painterly vistas. Others resolve into pure graphic design, the futurist machine violence of piston-pumping steam trains mirrored by the kinetic rush of galloping horses. Columbu even pays direct homage to Edweard Muybridge, the British-born photography pioneer who created those iconic early sequences of horses in motion back in the late 19th century.
Amassing around 30,000 drawings and paintings over the course of production, Columbu invokes the elemental Sardinian landscape as a series of abstract minimalist visas, sometimes using just the sparest of brushstrokes, or even an entirely blank screen. He also incorporates scratches and stains, inky smudges and runic blotches randomly generated during the animation process into the film’s overall aesthetic, creating a looping, flickering, glitchy feel similar to that of degraded vintage celluloid.
The trade-off for all these arty flourishes is that the narrative thread of Balentes sometimes get a little lost in stylistic swerves and loops: dialogue is fragmentary, the timeline diffuse, naturalistic performances reduced to blocky modernist graphics by rotoscoping and other techniques. But Columbu helps ease this problem with sparing use of explanatory inter-titles written in the Sardinian language, a dialect closer to Latin than modern Italian. In another knowing nod to silent-era cinema, the soundtrack also incorporates elements of Wolfgang Zeller’s mournful orchestral score from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s early horror classic Vampyr (1932). The cumulative effect is a melancholy memory palace of a film that feels both antique and modern, strikingly avant-garde yet hauntingly beautiful.
Director, screenwriter: Giovanni Columbu
Cast: Bruno Sedda, Andrea Sedda, Simonetta Columbu, Maria Antonietta Secchi, Giovanni Secchi
Editing: Giovanni Columbu, Benni Atria
Producers: Giovanni Columbu, Daniele Maggioni, Flavia Oertwig
Music: André Feldhaus, Filippo Ripamonti, Stefano Tore
Sound design: Massimo Mariani, Nujin Kartal
Venue: Rotterdam International Film Festival (Harbour)
Production company, world sales: Luches SRL (Italy)
In Sardinian, Italian
70 minutes
