FABRIZIO MALTESE | VOYAGE(S) DE L'ÂME
Based between Luxembourg and Paris, Fabrizio Maltese is a photographer, specializing in celebrity portraits and film sets. His work has been featured on the covers of The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, GQ, and Sight & Sound. As a director, he often incorporates photography into his work. Fascinated by themes of emptiness, absence, isolation and the search for identity, this multidisciplinary artist continues what he calls his own "journey of the soul" begun over twenty years ago as Maltese left his native country, Italy...
3 FILMS, 3 EXHIBITIONS
For the first time in Canada, CINEMANIA presents three Maltese documentaries: The Invitation (2022), based on an idea by Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako and the late Pol Cruchten, I Fiori Persi (The Lost Flowers) (2021), a personal story lived during the pandemic in Italy, and California Dreaming (2019), about a small community lost in the Mojave Desert. In addition, CINEMANIA is organizing three photographic exhibitions at the PHI Centre, at the Cinémathèque Québécoise and at the Sofitel Montreal Le Carré Doré Hotel. Maltese imagined a different experience for each location that will allow visitors to discover his craft as a photographer, which is itself inseparable from his craft as a filmmaker.
FILMS
CALIFORNIA DREAMING
Fabrizio Maltese | Luxembourg - 2019 - 1h44 - VOSTF
Exploration of California City, the third largest city in California in terms of surface, but with a practically non-existing agglomeration. At least not as the idealist Mendelsohn had envisioned when he bought the land in 1958 and laid out wide avenues through the sandy expanses. The businessman never managed to attract investors. Fabrizio Maltese tries to embrace these places marked by never inhabited plots. The stories of its inhabitants with different origins, like the one of Jean-Paul LeBlanc, who left from and their precariousness, embody the disillusions of the American Dream.
LOOK AT THE SCREENINGS
I FIORI PERSI
Fabrizio Maltese | Luxembourg - 2021 - 1h12 - VOSTFIn March 2020, in the middle of a pandemic. Fabrizio returns to Italy after his father suffers a heart attack. One of the hardest trials of his life begins. Visits to the hospital are forbidden. At Easter, his father finally comes back home. But then events take on a different dimension. The virus has entered the house to choose a new victim... The personal drama of a son who feels the urgency to document his most intimate pain.
LOOK AT THE SCREENINGS
L'INVITATION
Fabrizio Maltese | Luxembourg - 2022 - 1h18 - VOSTA
Two filmmakers, Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako (César for best director for Timbuktu) and Luxembourgian Pol Cruchten, plan to make a film together. The shooting is about to start when circumstances change... Pol's untimely death leaves a big gap - and to a promise to keep. Photographer and director Fabrizio Maltese, initially intended to create the images for this project, takes him under his wing. His challenge will be to give his vision and his humanity, inspired by the spirit evoked by the two artists, to preserve a friendship too soon interrupted by discovering a huge and little-known country, Mauritania.
"When you are looking for someone, the search for the other is always a search for oneself, always." With poetry, Maltese undertakes a fascinating journey into the soul, made of presences and absences, which invites the viewer to do the same.
"When you are looking for someone, the search for the other is always a search for oneself, always." With poetry, Maltese undertakes a fascinating journey into the soul, made of presences and absences, which invites the viewer to do the same.
LOOK AT THE SCREENINGS
FROM 1st to 13th NOVEMBER
SOFITEL MONTRÉAL LE CARRÉ DORÉ | CINÉMATHÈQUE QUÉBÉCOISE
FREE ADMISSION
GLAMOUR, EN TOUTE INTIMITÉ (OPENING AT LA CINÉMATHÈQUE QUÉBÉCOISE 12H - 2 NOV)
© Fabrizio Maltese
The Intimate Glamour series, is exhibited in two locations, the lobby of the Sofitel Hotel and the Foyer Luce-Guilbeault of the Cinémathèque Québécoise. Intimate Glamour is a collection of photographs to which celebrities of the 7th art, active in the French-speaking world as well as in Hollywood, entrusted their image and that of the films they were promoting to be published in specialized film magazines, such as “The Hollywood Reporter”, to which Maltese contributed to with his portfolios for almost ten years.
At the Cinémathèque, mainly photos of the shooting of several European art house films and essays will be exhibited. This includes images captured by the photographer, used for promotion, and applied to a variety of media: posters, press releases, press kits, etc. A way for Maltese to remind us that advertising begins on set. The photographer is usually the one who produces the first images that will be broadcast by a production. The poster and the advertising elements then used in the various festivals, where Maltese also makes his portraits, constitute an additional link in the chain of promotion.
At the Cinémathèque, mainly photos of the shooting of several European art house films and essays will be exhibited. This includes images captured by the photographer, used for promotion, and applied to a variety of media: posters, press releases, press kits, etc. A way for Maltese to remind us that advertising begins on set. The photographer is usually the one who produces the first images that will be broadcast by a production. The poster and the advertising elements then used in the various festivals, where Maltese also makes his portraits, constitute an additional link in the chain of promotion.
PREPARATORY SHOTS
The Cinémathèque Québécoise also hosts a collection of preparatory pictures, taken with a Polaroid and an iPhone, from the films of Maltese, California Dreaming and I Fiori Persi.
2 TO 30 NOVEMBER
CENTRE PHI
FREE ADMISSION
DE PLUS PRÈS
De plus près (Up Close) exhibition comments on the hyper-dissemination, mediatization and consumption of celebrity images, and the control photographers have - or do not have - over their images once they enter the digestive tract of mass consumption. Fabrizio Maltese explores the meaning of the image of a movie star placed outside their purely cinematographic context. Here, the artist reappropriates one of his own images, which has been made public by the broadcast media, and transforms it. He grants himself the possibility to reinterpret it in a unique way and to limit its diffusion in a very controlled way. Close-up evokes the ephemeral nature of the photographic means by reversing the process; from a digital file to a singular image, a cyanotype turned to hand-printed green tea, from a mass distributed content to a unique work of art.
