“Luminoso spazio scuola”, the film by Italian Mauro Colombo in competition at the HotDocs in Toronto, the documentary Oscars

There is a thin line that separates life from death. A border with which we are all called to deal, made up of pain, farewells, abandonments and questions that often remain unanswered. The documentary maker Mauro Colombo undertook a long journey to meet those who live on this border, exploring the external and internal space through their experience to try to give shape to these questions, without claiming to provide absolute answers.

He was born like this”Wild Gleaming Space” (Bright wild space, ed.), a documentary resulting from five years of work by the Italian director, who has lived and worked in Panama for years. The film was selected for the Toronto Hot Docs, one of the most prestigious festivals in the sector, where it will be screened as a world premiere on May 1st.

After the death of his father, the director, returning to Panama, comes across a lifeless body on a road in the middle of the jungle. He tries to revive him with cardiac massage, the person comes back to life for a few seconds and then dies again. Faced with this coincidence, Columbus embarks on an intimate journey towards unexplored territories, seeking a dialogue with death: “I found myself faced with two dead bodies in a few days. This particular situation led me to question myself more deeply on what death represents for me – the director tells us -. This question reflected my desire to explore, through a documentary film, the relationship between us and a space that we do not know how to define and understand in its entirety.”

Colombo decided to follow an imaginary narrative line, based on free association, which allowed him to combine the unusual experiences of different people, united by a personal confrontation with an extreme frontier: “With our film we don’t want to look for answers but to enter in an intimate exploration of the indefinite space represented by death, stimulating an intimate dialogue with this mystery of life”.

Guided by curiosity and a deep desire for understanding, Mauro Colombo thus immerses himself in intimate stories of people who face extreme and indefinite spaces. A blind hermit in Italy he leads mourners on silent retreats, a astrophysicist in Chile he studies black holesone neuropsychologist studies consciousness through near-death experiences in Belgium, one music therapist in Spain he accompanies terminally ill patients, two indigenous women of Panama search for their ancestral village lost and buried under water when the Panama Canal was built, a French acrobat emerged from a month-long coma talks about his experience while sailing in the Pacific, a mother wants to send the family’s cherished belongings son died in the stratosphere.

“Wild Gleaming Space” is a documentary that invites viewers to reflect on their own perceptions of the physical and symbolic frontiers of life and death, offering an opening to deeper understanding in the context of loss and the ever-present mysteries of existence.