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A MEMORY OF SOMETHING THAT NEVER EXISTED


29:09 MIN. / 2025 (CH/IT) / ESSAY
DIRECTED BY: ELIAS BÖTTICHER

Migrating birds flicker above the rooftops of Rome. Longing for a city of lights, Fadri wanders through distant memory spaces. The lights of a Sicilian oil refinery cast dark shadows over people’s dwellings, all while fleeting moments offer hope - even when the water seems to be growing murky everywhere else.


COMMENTARY: 

This work emerges in a present where democratic structures fracture, where authoritarian thinking gains traction, where foundational assumptions prove unstable. What began as documentary research into a Sicilian refinery processing Russian crude was irrevocably altered by personal rupture. The observational premise collapsed. What remains is an investigation of power made visible: how industrial landscapes serve as built records of extraction, dependency, control – steel and concrete holding the tensions that course through geopolitical space.


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