Rä Di Martino - Controfigura

A small film crew is wandering about Marrakesh and the surrounding desert. They are looking for locations for the remake of an American film in which a man swims his way home, passing through the houses and pools that he finds along the route. Corrado is the stand in used to test the shots, locations and the swimming pools in which the lead will be filmed. While we watch his attempts to get into the part, the real actors and a real crew burst onto the scene, on a set in which no one is in the right place. A film with a crisis of identity, in a surreal search for itself.

Traveling in Morocco and talking to the many Europeans who transferred there, I was struck by the number of hotels, swimming pools and immense golf courses that have been constructed in recent years, especially in Marrakesh. The city has to face an ever growing number of tourists of all kinds, and has to keep them all happy: from the wealthy Russians, Arabs or Europeans, who build themselves private paradises walled off from the rest of the city, to ex-hippies and people on package tours. New presences that have profoundly transformed the landscape, with hundreds of swimming pools scattered around the city. This is where I imagined my swimmer, a stand in suffering from a midlife crisis, and at the same time the crisis of his alter egos, of the real actors and of the system they represent.