Cinema Cielo

Danio Manfredini, an undisputed master of contemporary theatre, brings one of his most significant works back to the stage for ERT, more than 20 years after its original production. Cinema Cielo – an award-winning work – takes its name from a now-closed Milanese adult cinema, turning its lens on the people who inhabited it: women and men for whom sex can be a need, an escape, a commodity, a desire for companionship, or a longing for love. Into this tangible world of solitary and marginalised figures, Manfredini weaves Jean Genet’s debut novel, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, with Divine, her lovers and a seductive murderer. The narrative material becomes a sound score unfolding through a series of tableaux, entrusted to the voices of the director – who also performs – and Patrizia Aroldi, Vincenzo Del Prete and Giuseppe Semeraro.

The result is a work suspended between reality and vision, where the shadows inhabiting the cinema bring other lives, other loves and other forms of solitude back to the surface, in a narrative that brings reality and imagination together.

Lenght: 1 hour 20 minutes