Movies: Vittorio De Seta

This portrait of a film director unlike any other attempts to capture the essence of Vittorio de Seta’s rapport with the humble people he filmed and elegantly brought to Cinema Scope’s big screen in color from the 1950s onwards. From his home in Cala...

Harshness and beauty exist side by side in this look at the lives of sulfur mine workers and their families in southern Italy....

The first light of dawn. The sound of a boat and the screech of birds fill the wide expanse of sea. Black rocks emerge from the water, the “sciara” – the volcanic scoria – of Stromboli, the underwater sulfurous emanations, the layers of reddish rock ...

The unpredictable nature of the sea governs the world of Sicilian fishermen as they work, rest, and seek refuge from a storm....

A short anthropological documentary from 1954. Director De Seta was fortunate enough to document swordfish fishing; by 1956 it no longer existed....

Filming amid the flaxen wheat fields of Sicily, Vittorio De Seta documents the everyday rituals of farmers during harvest time....

Alan Lomax (1915-2002) was a song collector who recorded ordinary people, who gave their heart and soul in front of his microphone. The film maker decides to search for people Lomax recorded, travelling through Europe in an old Volkswagen. His journ...

...

A desert village perched on a mountain of Aspromonte. A young farmer teaches the craft to a laborer from Senegal. The next day the farmer will have to emigrate to the North in search of work and leave his mother and his homeland. Against the backdrop...

...

...

The subsea well constructed in Gela in 1959 by Eni was the first of its kind in Europe. The facility consisted of two interdependent complexes: a steel platform on the sea floor and a support ship. The very viscous oil gushed from the Sicilian land t...

In this 1980 documentary, originally in three parts but presented here in its entirety, Vittorio De Seta presents the drama of the Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the great Asian metropolis....