Francesco Zanatta

From 1947 to 1969, the U.S. Air Force carried out a systematic study of unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings, codenamed “Project Blue Book.” Thousands of reports from American and European citizens were recorded during those years; more than 700 cases remained “unidentified.” The film reuses original documents from the now-declassified project, superimposing them over family footage from the same period. In the encounter between the domestic and the scientific, the familiar and the alien, a hidden portrait emerges of a nation haunted by its own astronomical obsessions.

Driving and walking through the wonders of central Italy.

A trip to a little island and the return of nostalgia.

A trip along the beach of the Venice Lido.

Dreaming about Venezia 77.

La Piave is an attempt to describe the Piave river and its surroundings as a character in constant change. Each chapter shows a different research session in which the landscape is analyzed in its structure through individual shots, thus forming a naturalist mosaic that accounts for the different conformations of the territory over the years. This first part collects the documentation of the place made by me between 2017 and 2021, as well as a couple of found footage sequences.

From 1947 to 1969, the U.S. Air Force carried out a systematic study of unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings, codenamed “Project Blue Book.” Thousands of reports from American and European citizens were recorded during those years; more than 700 cases remained “unidentified.” The film reuses original documents from the now-declassified project, superimposing them over family footage from the same period. In the encounter between the domestic and the scientific, the familiar and the alien, a hidden portrait emerges of a nation haunted by its own astronomical obsessions.

Driving and walking through the wonders of central Italy.

A trip to a little island and the return of nostalgia.

A trip along the beach of the Venice Lido.

Dreaming about Venezia 77.

La Piave is an attempt to describe the Piave river and its surroundings as a character in constant change. Each chapter shows a different research session in which the landscape is analyzed in its structure through individual shots, thus forming a naturalist mosaic that accounts for the different conformations of the territory over the years. This first part collects the documentation of the place made by me between 2017 and 2021, as well as a couple of found footage sequences.

A weeping for a forest, a weeping for a river.

A collective act of caring over the course of one night.

An old woman relives her life through words.

23 days of waiting, boredom and light.

Halfway between a video installation, a performance and an in situ work, Il carbonasso was created starting from the discovery and intense exploration of a hidden and isolated place near the Piave river. The video consists of a series of long and fixed shots in which it is possible to perceive a mysterious and elusive creature. Observation soon becomes contemplation and meditation in which the gaze is lost in the image in search of the enigmatic presence. The title of the work and the name of the (non) protagonist derive from the dialectal name of the rat snake, a very common non-poisonous snake near water courses.

Bodies in spaces and the search for emptiness.

To search. To remember and to search. To remember and to find. To search and to find again. In the labyrinth of the mind, the only way to find is to get lost in the limbo and start again from oneself.

Devoured images.

An exploration of the human body in the age of the internet through hundreds of Youtube clips.

A man in crisis, disappointed by others and by himself.

A friendship in four chapters.

Experimental documentary on fog.

This is not a flicker film.

Apophenia is a horror film, a video essay and a travel documentary in which an urban legend becomes the starting point of a Lovecraftian tale in search of a disturbing unknown. The images emerge from the web intertwining and overlapping, showing themselves as symptoms of a collective schizophrenia to which the user slowly succumbs.

Something from a year that never existed.

A study of the concept of noise intended not only as an unpleasant sound but also as a visual artifact. The so-called high sensitivity in digital cameras allows us to see in the dark by adding an artificial grain to the video, sacrificing its quality. In these night shots, noise is not avoided but rather enhanced, thus creating abstract, hypnotic images that pulsate slowly.

First part of a video-diary on the Piave river. A meditation on the landscape and its images.

Third part of a video diary on the Piave river. Stillness and movement.

A film about light, shadows and the creatures around them.

A meta-film about a meta-journey.

A six hour journey through the night.

Second part of a video diary on the Piave river. Cuts and transitions.

In facing the lens and addressing an intangible audience, the face on the web becomes a disturbing mirror of its own growing dehumanization. Everyday makeup dissects this artificial mask by discovering the raw and pulsating matter of which it is made. The digital image is gutted and broken down, finally revealing its atom, its pure essence: the pixel. This autopsy process of the internettian non-body thus allows us to go back to an aesthetic root in which thought is not filtered and in which entertainment is reduced to an inevitable colored chaos.

Between the early 1990s and late 2000s, in what can be considered the golden age of Italian disco, a number of people chose to document a swirling, sleepless nightlife. What emerged is a collection of low-definition videos in which flashing lights, pulsating music and dancing bodies merge to become a mass in constant agitation. Viva la notte starts from this material to explore and expand the sense of loss that characterizes it, taking it to a level of abstraction and opacity where the image dissolves similarly to the world that generated it. Forms are lost in the dark and what remains are the evanescent traces of another place, populated by fleeting ghosts in search of perpetual instability.

A study on surveillance videos showing the last sighting of missing people. The film is structured as a long walk through the city in which the exit from the scene corresponds to the total disappearance of the person. Sometimes the subject is more evident, other times it mingles in the crowd or appears in a few pixels in the distance. The edges of the picture are also the limits of the image, which can be easily crossed but which, in the case of these videos, become openings to the unknown.

An installation designed to be exhibited on the windows of the Museo del Novecento in Milan and consists of the reassembly of fragments from Fuori Orario, the famous program conceived by enrico ghezzi. Over the course of 60 minutes, film sequences, montages, theme songs and nocturnal presentations alternate between the early nineties and the end of the 2000s. Fuori Orario is seen fragmentarily, it is thought first of all by separating image and sound: only inside the museum can it be heard and only outside can it be seen. In both cases, the work is made up of superimpositions, forms and words that escape and chase each other. Entering the endless night, the impossibility of an absolute gaze is increasingly revealed. In the construction of the sequences, the previous thought is not forgotten, but it is recontextualized within the same frame, it is put back into the discourse, conscious but uncontrolled reactivation.

Ricardo Lopez doesn't talk anymore and the TV is always on. A silent portrait of a sad and tragic figure.

Along the river, the landscape is uncertain. Light settles and unsettles.

A thick forest hides a river landscape and the eye stubbornly fails to see.

A man searching for a new truth.