16mm, Color, 8min. 2003.
This film includes filmed frames that were hand manipulated with bleach and hand painted. The visual component is constructed by fragments of previous work and the sound is created from fragments of individual improvised noise. It juxtaposes two cultures from an immigrant’s perspective. Religious traditions become indicative of a stifling but yet passionate culture which form the basis of memories and dreams of the land of origin.

Cast:  Rita Caruso, Maddalena Pusateri, Joseph Alessi, Joy Scimè

16mm, color 8 min, 1998.
This film looks at the struggle of a person grasping onto individuality in a controlling and authoritarian social structure by focusing on a medical experience. The mechanization of medicine strips the patient of any individuality by reducing language and basic body functions such as breathing to automated procedures. The positive and negative image is used to intertwine a mesh of repetition to evoke the mechanization of the human body.

Cast:  Vincenzo Mistretta
Voice Over: Patricia Doyen, Timothy Shepard, Josie Walters-Johnston

16mm, 25 min.
This film examines the search for sexual and cultural identity revolving around a homecoming. The main character, Piero, returns to his hometown in Sicily after a long absence. The people and culture of the land he once was part of are now alien to him. The film was entirely shot in the province of Palermo, Sicily.

Cast: Anna Lisa Tornatore, Elisabetta Correlli, Salvatore Matranga, Maria Rita Caruso

Super 8, 5min. 2006
Swan is a re-photographing of a popular US television extreme make over program, “The Swan”. The obscure and abstract super 8 images de-construct the polished TV show. Superimposed is the images of stitches dancing on the screen as an attempt, in vain, to sew the images back to whole as a comment on the invasive nature of the program on the female body.

Super 8, B&W 8 min. 2005
Gramsci-Roma is inspired by the prison letters of Antonio Gramsci and the city of Rome, where he was arrested by the Fascist-dominated Italian state in 1926. The film represents Rome with images that lie in-between quotidian and tourism. These images weave through and collide the economic and class struggle presented by Gramsci and the coexistence of modern capital consumption and the historical commodity of the ancient city of Rome.

Voice Over: Seonhyoung Kim, Vincenzo Mistretta

All the images of this film were created by hand manipulating existing found footage or painting and scratching on clear and black leader.  The footage is partly from unused scenes from other films I made.

Appearing:  Tracey Mcguirl

Music by Otto Muller

DV/16mm, 20min. 2008, 16:9, color/B&W
In an essay style cinema “Walking the Holy Land” is a study of the act of walking through the city of Rome. The act of walking is presented as a personal crusade to an act of social defiance to a mode of protest and conflict.

The first of the series is a portrait of Jonas Mekas.  I met Mr. Mekas at the Lucca Film Festival in the town of Lucca in the Tuscan region of Italy.  Mr. Mekas was the honored filmmaker for that year.  I had with me a super 8 camera and shot a roll of black and white film during my time at the festival in the style of Mekas’ films.

The Second film in the series is a portrait of installation artist/musician Giuliano Lombardo.  This portrait was shot in black & white 16mm film during a day of one of Lombardo’s performances in Rome, Italy.

16mm, 32 min. (in Post-production  )
The film is an interpretation of Franca Rame’s adaptation of Euripedes tragedy “Medea”.  Medea’s voice is presented as a self analytical monologue. The making of the film is exposed through cinematic devices and is interwoven, as a reflexive journey of juxtapositions, throughout the filmmaker’s documentation of his relationship with his mother during the making of the film.  The film presents the mother as subject, operator and performer due to the reflexive nature of the cinematic lens.

CAST

• Medea: Joy Scimè
• Mother: Vincenza Cirano Mistretta
• Filmmaker: Vincenzo Mistretta
• Chorus: Rosa Alcalà, Mavis Wolcott, Anna Maria Campagnola
• Jason: Vincent G. Mistretta
• Jason’s Lover: Mila Hess
• Medea’s Children: Joseph Pecoraro, Jessica Pecoraro
• Father: Giuseppe Mistretta

LOCATION


The film Medea has been shot predominantly in Buffalo, NY and Fort Erie, Ont.  There are also scenes shot in Sicily, Italy.

• Buffalo, NY – FiddleHeads Restaurant, Romeo’s Bakery & Cafe, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, The Buffalo Historical Society, Private Residencies in North Buffalo
• Fort Erie Canada – Erie Beach
• 
Sicily – The Town of Aspra, The City of Bagheria, The Town of Monreale, The City of Palermo, The ruins of Segeste

BASED ON

This film is based on a play with the same title by Italian play writers, 1997 Nobel Price winner, Dario Fo and Franca Rame. Fo’s and Rame’s Medea is adapted from the Greek tragedy by Euripides. My film tells the story of Medea in modern day. It focuses on Medea’s thought process which leads her to realize her subordinate condition as a woman and ultimately to murder her children for the purpose of spawning the creation of a new woman. Fo’s and Rame’s play takes Euripides tragedy and creates a reading of it through the microscope of European feminist theory, such as Luce Irigaray and her feminist theories based on language. According to Irigaray, at some point, in the development of language, the masculine gender became the more valorous. In turn, the role of the female, and that which she engages in as a woman, is deemed menial to that of a man’s role. Therefore, motherhood is looked upon as a non-valuable activity, an act which is seen as non-productive according to today’s social construct based on economic value. Medea, in her act of killing her children, shatters the idea of mother as servant to man’s needs, and as overseer of his goods.

Franca Rame, who performs and co-wrote “Sex? Thanks, Don’t Mind if I Do!”, is the co-author of many dramatic works, including “All Home, Bed, and Church” (1977), “The Open Couple” (1983), “Female Parts” (1986), “A Woman Alone and Other Plays” (1989), and “Seventh Commandment: Steal a Little Less” (1992). An actress, dramatist, and lecturer of international renown, Ms. Rame was born to a family of puppeteers who have been practicing their art for several generations, and began her acting career at the age of eight. She joined Dario Fo in the theatre in 1951 (and married him in 1954) and has since collaborated with him as stage performer, writer, and editor for dozens of plays and monologues.

Together Fo and Rame have established a worldwid reputation for biting satire in their writing and performances. The dangerous political issues that have been subjects of their theatre include corruption in the Catholic Church and the Italian government, police brutality, abuses in the prison system, violations of human rights, the Mafia, rape, and the denial of Italian women’s access to divorce and abortion.
Drawing on traditions ranging from the commedia dell’arte to puppetry, clowning, and storytelling, Fo and Rame have subjected every institution, political party, power broker, corrupt organization and controversial law in Italy to their formidable satirical powers. Over the years, they have been censored, banned, rebuked, denied visas – and played to packed houses all over the world.   (text from www.amrep.org)

Euripides – Athenian tragic playwright lived from ca. 485 BCE to 406 BCE; Euripides began his career as a tragic playwright in 455 BCE; his extant plays include: Alcestis (438), Medea (431), Children of Heracles (ca. 430), Hippolytus (428, first prize), Andromache (ca. 425), Hecuba (ca. 424), Suppliant Women (ca. 423), Electra (ca. 420), Heracles (ca. 416), Trojan Women (415, second prize), Iphigenia among the Taurians (ca. 414), Ion (ca. 413), Helen (412), Phoenician Women (ca. 410), Orestes (408), Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis (after 406, posthumous first prize), Cyclops (date unknown, possibly ca. 410).