The objects found in people’s pockets – photos, pieces of paper – tell the stories of their owners' lives, their hopes and their pasts, according to forensic scientist Dr Cristina Cattaneo. Wallets with phone numbers, school reports, university IDs and passports, boxes of medication, T-shirts of European soccer teams, rings, telephones and memories.
In Torino, a bittersweet crowd is bringing its own belongings to a pawn shop, waiting for a ransom or the final auction. Between the thousands of faces that tell the human inventory of the crisis, three stories intertwine unconsciously in the thin line of moral debt. Sandra, a young trans, in order to escape her past sells her fur coat. Her gaze will cross Stefano’s, a novice who just started working at the bank, and who drags her towards a tender obsession. Michele, a retired porter, asks for a loan to a family member, who will turn out to be fatally the wrong person to ask a favour from.
Il mio unico crimine è vedere chiaro nella notte addresses the issues of censorship in Italian cinema and psychological removal in art. The work’s title—my only crime is seeing clearly in the night—incisively highlights the conflict at the basis of creation and censorship. The film, with its re-imagining of film fragments, cut out and eliminated with bureaucratic scrupulousness, doggedly retraces the cuts inflicted on the productions of past masters and thinks them through once again as the signs of a cinema yearning to be completed. The cut, which aims to interrupt the relationship between the gaze and the possible, instead becomes a place to be repopulated with… ghosts.
