‘Signs of Life’ by Leandro Picarella (Italy, Switzerland/2023/106′) won the Audience Award for Best Feature Film – DAO at the Trento Film Festival.
After its debut at the Rome Film Festival and its arrival in Aosta Valley cinemas with excellent public response, ‘Segnali di vita’ also convinces one of the most important festivals dedicated to mountain films. Filmed entirely in the Saint-Barthélemy valley, ‘Segnali di vita’ is produced by Qoomon with Rai Cinema in co-production with Soap Factory and DBW Communication, with the executive production of L’Eubage and the support of Film Commission Vallée d’Aoste.
“After the Rome Film Festival and the public success during the cycle of screenings in Valle d’Aosta, with the public award won in Trento ‘Segnali di Vita’ proves to be a film that enchants spectators with its delicacy and depth of a story set in our mountains in an unusual and fascinating context”, comments Alessandra Miletto, Director of the Vallée d’Aoste Film Commission.
“All excellent premises for the film’s journey in theaters, which begins in these days: we are sure that the public will fall in love not only with the characters who animate this very particular community, but also with the territory that hosts these profound relationships”.
In addition to the official prizes awarded by the International Jury and the fifteen special awards, the Trento Film Festival also awards two audience prizes every year. The Festival public was able to vote in the MyTFF area of the website, assigning a number of gentians which corresponds to a vote from 1 to 5. The sum of the votes decreed the two winners of the 2024 edition: in addition to ‘Segnali di vita ‘, the Public Award for Best Mountaineering Film – Rotari went to Monte Corno – ‘It seemed that I was in the air’ by Luca Cococcetta (Italy/2024/72′).
‘Signs of Life’ will now return to Italian cinemas in the coming weeks, with various screenings in Rome, Milan, Agrigento, Messina, Mazara del Vallo, Palermo, Catania, Brescia, Sciacca (AG), Udine and Genoa.
Mixing reality and fiction, the film follows the trajectory of Paolo Calcidese, an astrophysicist who decides to move to Lignan, a sparsely populated village in the Saint-Barthélemy valley, to work at the Astronomical Observatory of the Aosta Valley, and his meeting with the community that inhabits these places. If at first the astrophysicist hopes to find in these wild and remote places the ideal environment to concentrate on his research and experiment with new technologies without distractions, a technical problem with the main telescope forces him to interrupt the study of the stars and turn his attention his attention towards life forms that he had deliberately neglected: human beings.
Leandro Picarella is a Sicilian director and screenwriter. Between 2010 and 2012 he made his first short films. Signs of Life (Qoomoon with Rai Cinema) is his third feature film, after Triokala (CSC Production, 2015) and Divinations (Qoomoon with Rai Cinema, 2020).
