Overseas

25’

A documentary by Irene Felici produced by Natia Docufilm
and supported by IULM University.

“There’s something missing in Bangladesh compared to the rest of the world. Although Information services are being developed, there’s still a lack of possibility to be able to talk to relatives or friends who are far away. Fortunately this belongs to the past: there are girls who carry the Internet with them and distribute it in every village. They are the Info Ladies.”

This Film is a reflection on the figure of the fighting woman within a reality that does not yet favor the emancipation; it is the story of these women offer help to the inhabitants of a rural Bengali village; but even more this film wants to be a reflection on the digital, on the technological medium and on its influence on a so far deprived reality.
The topic gradually widens to the point of creating in the audience the need to reflect on technology in general and on the intervention of the photographic medium.

The sequence of close-ups makes this process palpable, allowing the viewer's eye to identify itself with the medium.
Technology, which at first sight can be perceived as impersonal, becomes a human extension. A closeness between the director and the protagonist becomes a real visible link through the eyes of the audience: the director is also in the film, there is as reflection in the eyes of the others, an imperceptible but present shadow.
The close- up makes this physical presence visible but closeness is something that goes beyond the act of shooting, beyond physicality.
The looks come out from the "fiction" given by the knowledge of being filmed and re-enter in an even more naked reality, which remains impressed in the audience mind. Words, looks, actions such as movements, silences and voids flow into a documentary that attempts to proceed in the direction of authentic life. From stasis to motion, from absence to presence.
At a time when the ease of the filming means is rampant - and the language constantly gets dirty around the stolen pixels of telephones and invisible cameras - the strength of the gaze continues to be preserved in the need for detail, for zoom, for approach. Whoever connects travels overseas, but the director himself is in the overseas, enters the village up to the looks and slowly comes out of that world.
In the foreground, in addition to smartphones and large computers, will always be the  inner whispers voice.

Overseas or simply staying here, the faces still serve, more than yesterday, to tell us what happens to our humanity and to where we can drive our attention.

SELECTIONS

Slow Film Fest - Roma
Wuman Visions

Georgia Documentary Film Festival Fall 2019

Intimate Lens

WOW Middle East - Dubai, UAE

Roma Cinema Doc

Women of Wonders Film Fest 2020 - Honolulu, USA

Ariano International Film Festival - Italy

Idee dal Mondo - Italy

Bayfest Festival - China