L’Enigma de Jean Rouch à Turin, chronique d’un film raté

At the beginning of the 80s the famous French ethnographer and filmmaker Jean Rouch, one of the leading spirits of the Nouvelle Vague, left the Niger River and the Dogon people behind and came to Turin to make a movie with three of the city's young filmmakers. The documentary tells the story of what was a true "laboratory of ideas" and the birth of the film that came out of it (Enigma, by Jean Rouch and Alberto Chiantaretto, Marco di Castri and Daniele Pianciola), reconstructing the two years that passed between Rouch's arrival and the conclusion of the project through the voices of its main protagonists, in dialogue with some extraordinary material: over twenty hours of the "making of," perhaps the most complete documentation of a process of cinematic creation and certainly the most complete documentation of the way Jean Rouch worked, of how he animated the set and that undefined place beyond the set, where human aspects and technical and creative ones came together, becoming part of the film, in the manner of cinéma verité. A hundred years after his birth, this exceptional record constitutes a tribute to the great ethnographer and a novel account of his unknown Italian "adventure." (Venice International Film Festival)