Hugo Pratt

The title 'The desire to be useless' recalls a famous Hugo Pratt's expression and contains a double meaning. On one hand, it representes the comic's claim as an art form, long considered marginal but elevated, but by Pratt was considered a language with high literary and artistic value. On the other, it expresses a life philosophy founded on freedom, on the rejection of reducing existence to fiction or to commodity, and on the possibility of the adventure and the unexpected. Containing interviews with Patrizia Zanotti, Dominique Petitfaux, Thierry Thomas e Marco Steiner, the documentary completes a cinematic research lasted twenty years, returning Hugo Pratt as one of the most important auhor of illustrated literature and an artist still capable of being received by the contemporary audience.

Several key words emerge from Hugo Pratt's work, inseparable from his life: travel, adventure, erudition, esotericism, mystery, poetry, melancholy... and of course, Corto Maltese, his hero and alter ego, who established him as one of the greatest names in comic books. Born in Italy in 1927 and dying in Switzerland sixty-eight years later, Hugo Pratt, born without an H and with only one T, grew up in the shadow of a fascist father who took him at a very young age to Ethiopia, which was occupied by Mussolini's forces. The teenager developed a fascination for the wide-open spaces of Africa, soon followed by an irresistible attraction to the Indian world. This was the starting point for a life of travel, success, conquests, rare failures, and marked by his veneration for the American cartoonist Milton Caniff, his absolute master.

When Hugo Pratt passed away in 1995, he was holding an Ethiopian cross in his left hand. In order to understand his enduring love of the black continent, Hugo Pratt’s companion, Jean Claude Guilbert, together with a group of like-minded people, searches for traces of him in the Horn of Africa. Thanks to their efforts and invaluable audiovisual archive material, a new picture of this remarkable artist and his attitude towards Africa begins to emerge.

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Right after she moves in with him, Frederico's new girlfriend Francesca sends him back to her former boyfriend's apartment to fetch her something she forgot - but he's surprised to find him lying there - dead. Assuming that Francesca killed him and sent him for cleaning up, he cuts him up in pieces, puts him in a suitcase and tries to get rid of it... but he has a hard time finding a suitably quiet place. Unfortunately there's a witness, who comes back on him. One thing leads to another, and the normally shy and overly fearful Frederico has to rid himself of more and more corpses until this black comedy ends.

Two aging crooks are given two weeks to repay a debt to a woman named The American. They recruit their recently deceased partner's son to help them break into a laboratory and steal the vaccine against STBO, a sexually transmitted disease that is sweeping the country. It's spread by having sex without emotional involvement, and most of its victims are teenagers who make love out of curiosity rather than commitment.

Richard Butler is the director of a Montreal advertising agency. When he meets Dyanne, a young beautiful model, he falls in love.

No synopsis available yet.