TUTTAUNANOTTE. AN ITALIAN CINEMATIC SHOWCASE
curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi
November 13th, 2025, e-flux Screening Room
By Finn Jubak
Muna Mussie’s Cinema Impero (2025) begins with images of the unlit interior of the eponymous theatre, built in Asmara, Eritrea by the Italians during their occupation of the country. As the film’s voiceover explains, the Italians barred Eritreans from these cinemas, which played propaganda newsreels and actualities to audiences of colonists. The cinema, originally built on Via Mussolini (now Godana Harnet, or Independence Boulevard), is one of many architectural scars from the time of Italian colonialism from 1889-1941, which gave the city its distinctive “modernist” buildings and street design. It’s clearly in a state of disuse and ruination, monitored by a single guard who points to the buckets used to catch leaks and the crumbling walls. Mussie’s film is reminiscent of others that conjure the trope of the abandoned cinema as a site of nostalgia, most notably Tsai Ming-Liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) or Kleber Mendonça Filho’s recent Retratos Fantasmas (2023). However, the film repurposes Cinema Impero as a device for re-engaging with archival moving images of colonial “expeditions” in Italian East Africa through the collections of Istituto Luce, Italy’s public film agency that was created by Mussolini and now integrated into Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Cinema Impero (2025)
Cinema Impero mostly consists of sequences drawn from the Istituto Luce archives, which have been processed through a sort of AI program that attempts to describe the images on screen. The descriptions are often inaccurate and misleading as to what, through context, a viewer understands to be taking place. The main point is that amidst these images of colonial violence, the computer is still confused as to whether we’re looking at a camel or a lion; all context is elided through the machine’s gaze. In this way, the work gestures at the challenges of relying on machine intelligence to process and interpret the colonial film archive, as many large digitization projects in Europe and elsewhere are increasingly doing in their attempts to make film “heritage” more accessible.
The haunted nature of Italian history, and the uncertain future, circle around and through Tuttaunanotte, a cinematic showcase curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi (actually a pair of curators, Francesco Ragazzi and Francesco Urbano), which screened in-person at e-flux on November 13. Tuttaunanotte will also have four iterations screening online through e-flux screening room throughout November. The program is the first public output of the Altérité Italienne project that Francesco Urbano Ragazzi have initiated with a group of artists and filmmakers, based in Italy or otherwise related to Italy, whose work makes up these screenings, and is within the framework of the inaugural Italian Fellowship for Curatorial Research at the American Academy in Rome.
The title of the program comes from Chantal Akerman’s Toute une nuit (1982), which flits between people in various romantic configurations over the course of a summer evening in Brussels. The interactions range from extremely subtle to grandiose, and so does the film: it feels both typical of Akerman’s highly minimal early style, but also comprehensible as a step up in her fascination with the form of the film musical which reached its apex in Golden Eighties (1986). Toute une nuite makes use musical interludes throughout, including a scene in which a couple sways to Gino Lorenzi (pseudonym for Gérard Berliner) singing L’Amore Perdonera. Within the logic of the film, the song gestures to a kind of generic universalism contained within pop music that echoes the unspecific intimacies we witness between the lovers onscreen; to Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, the French singer’s mispronounced and overdetermined Italian emblematizes an unstable Italian identity that Tuttaunanotte seeks to explore.
The program notes indicate that the included filmmakers have “have frayed the boundaries of national identity while also stretching the edges of their own.” As such, there are a number of works that touch on Italian identity, borders, and territory, or try to think through alternative modes of mapping space. One example is Ludovica Carbotta’s Monowe (2023), which follows a monologuing protagonist through a surreal interior filled with architectural odds and ends, the ruins of the fictional utopian city of Monowe. Carbotta has been working with the Monowe idea since 2016 via installations, sculpture, performance, and sound works that represent its spaces and buildings. Monowe represents “an ideal city: an urban model created for a single individual,” exploring the dialectic of form and function when it comes to civic institutions (are museums, libraries, courthouses still themselves without a public to serve?). Much of the film takes place in the Tribunale, where the single protagonist is putting himself on trial by taking on each role in the courtroom. The project can be read as an exploration of the isolating nature of urban life, but the courtroom scenes also conjure questions about justice and impunity: how can a single entity, both accuser and defendant, hold itself to account? In the context of the program it’s not difficult to think of Italy’s colonial past and the tautologies used to explain away gruesome crimes.
Where is Italy headed? From an American perspective, the country has recently been in the news as an encouraging crack in Europe’s unequivocal support for Israel as it wages a genocidal war in Gaza, with impressive general strikes that actually seem to have shaken government officials and at a scale that might challenge US imperialism more broadly. Tuttaunanotte certainly seems to float somewhere near these considerations, with talk of borders, land, and the false promise of the nation-state, without referencing anything directly.
Other films in the program address the theme of national identity, or an alternative version of it, in different ways. For Adoration (2022), Pauline Curnier Jardin has created a highly engaging animated short by working collaboratively with incarcerated women of Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca in Venice. The prison is located in what used to be a monastery, and the prisoners mostly riff on the image of the nun as an ecstatic and excessively excited figure. While upbeat, the film also raises questions about which populations are excluded from the national imaginary and how a place in history can be reclaimed. In Someplace in your Mouth (2024), which was commissioned by Sicilia Queer Filmfest, Beatrice Gibson and Nick Gordon film young people showing off their tricked out cars and motorbikes in a parking lot in Brancaccio, on the outskirts of Palermo. The short film overlays these images, unmistakeably shot on film, with a voice reading Magdalena Zurawski’s poem of the same name. The poem includes the line “Cash / was the only thing bringing life / to the pavement, so you and I vanished / with resolve and fucked in space un- / occupied.” The theme of bodies in space, filling or unoccupying it, returns again, in this display of automotive eros that also highlights an emergent youth subculture. The many different visions of Italian identity are brought to the fore in order to burst any notion of consistency or unity. This overwhelming rush of images is again activated in Raffaela Naldi Rossano’s Littoral Formations (2025), a short video collage work that superimposes lo-fi, home movie-like images of the artist as a child, sumptuous spaghetti meals, and a giant chocolate egg that says Buona Pascua. During the in-person screening, this film was the last in the program and transitioned into a live performance by the artist.
On a more obvious register, the title Tuttaunanotte also refers to the timespan of Akerman’s film, which takes place over the course of an evening, and the original concept for Francesco Urbano Ragazzi’s program was a single screening taking place over the course of one night. Some films were meant to evoke the early evening, then the deep night, then the dawn. Instead, the film programs of Tuttaunanotte, both online and in person, are presented as a “constellation” of works, many by the same filmmakers, that can be explored over days and at different times. This approach feels truer to the concept, which does not require a viewing order or a guiding logic, and offers no answers to the questions it raises.
