A subjective camera silently follows a child who runs through the spaces of an original architectural complex perched on a cliff. Architect Dante Bini’s clients, Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti, commissioned him to design their secret holiday home in a remote part of Sardinia. Its dome shape is made of thin cement, produced using a specific innovative technique Bini called Binishell. The house is nestled in raw nature. Its windows bracket portions of landscape as if they were an innovative cinemascope. The film examines the relationship between a new way of seeing that becomes a new way of living in a space. After having investigated every architectural detail, the film traces the birth of the visionary dwelling through the narrative voice of Giuseppina Isetta, land manager, who watched it being built in 1969. Today the rough shell is crumbling and charming architecture is showing its age.

 

Volker Sattel, born in 1970, lives and works as a writer, director and cameraman in Berlin. In the years 1993-99 he studied direction and photography at the Baden Wüürttemberg Film Academy. Since then, he has directed and produced documentaries and experimental films in cooperation with Mario Mentrup. Sattel’s works have received a number of awards, including the Schnittpreis of VG Bild-Kunst in Bonn and the Gerd Ruge Fellowship, both won in 2011 for the film Under Control - An Archaeology of Nuclear Power. In 2013 he was a researcher at the Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto along with Stefanie Gaus, with whom he made the film Beyond Metabolism. (2014)