About.
“Beneath the Wide Wide Heaven” (15 min, 2016): is an essay film that lingers in the shadow of Pier Paolo Pasolini — Marxist, Catholic, gay — a man who carried contradiction like a second skin. Here, he’s not just a director, but a conduit, absorbing the chaos of the world and channeling it into his work.
The film watches Pasolini as he watches the world: eyes fixed on history’s unraveling, mind lit with fury and grief. Through fragments of his films La Ricotta and the brutal imagery of Salò, we glimpse an artist torn between despair and duty, bearing witness to catastrophe, yet compelled to transform it into cinema.
This is not a portrait in the traditional sense, but a meditation on the filmmaker as seismograph, recording tremors of politics, power, and pain. In the film, Pasolini becomes both observer and participant, making films as acts of resistance, mourning, and relentless vision.
Misc.
- World Premiere: Oberhausen International Film Festival, Germany (2016)
- Winner of Best Editing Award at the Ramunas Atelier International Independent Film Awards, Lithuania (2016)
Film review by Katherine Marie Hooper, NYC filmmaker (2012)
“Beneath the wide wide Heaven” is a remarkable film in both its depth and scope of emotion. It is a shifting kaleidoscope of human feeling, from despair and anguish to the purest joys of flesh and spirit.
Throughout the film, beautifully poignant moments draw on archetypal cinematic moments that can be found across many films. This is achieved largely through the juxtaposition of sound design with iconic and symbolic images. The monastic song during the war sequence in particular feels as though one is experiencing in that moment all the occurrences of war in film at once. In these sequences, Bizri manages to draw out all such similar moments that have occurred in the history of film by simply – and painstakingly – transforming them into archetype.
Additionally, the way in which Bizri demonstrates the role of director as conveyor of human experience is profoundly beautiful. Pasolini, the director, is constantly watching, thinking, feeling…all in faith that the film, once it stands alone, will be sufficient and whole. And on him is the burden of describing, through image and sound, the human experience through the lens of his own perspective.
Simply put, this film is not only a triumph of human experience, encompassing the valleys and peaks of the human condition, but a meditation on the transparency of the director, and an ode to that all-consuming role.”