Festival del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro – Vincitore del Premio del Sindacato Nazionale Critici Cinematografici Italiani (SNCCI) e di una Menzione Speciale da parte della Giuria Internazionale
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Pesaro Film Festival 2025 – Winner of the Critics’ Union Prize + International Jury’s Honorable Mention
Is there any more violent of a sight than an optical white booth reading POLICE in the middle of quiet greenery? And anything lonelier than a disused railroad crossing among overgrown weeds?
Worldwide premiering at Italy’s 61st Pesaro Film Festival, “12 Asterisci” by Telemach Wiesinger is a film poem (as the director defines several of his works) made out of largely static shots of unspecified liminal spaces from all around Europe that immediately strikes for its flawless, 100% analog production. A collection of geometric compositions – each an eye candy of its own – photographed in black and white with a certain post punk taste¹ and perfectly matched by the hypnotic rhythm of a near-silent soundtrack – crows cawing in the distance, footsteps, a hardly identifiable mechanic breathing.
Metal pillars, bars, booths, peremptory signs on frontier architectures: images of violence, landscape marks that stand as a sort of metonymy for Europe’s self-inflicted abuses on its own spaces and people. However, simultaneously, such ruins and architectures appear as melancholic, neglected relics, once respected symbols of authority, now recipients of compassion and, strangely enough, affection: a thin pillar that used to line something uncrossable, posing right at the center of the frame; colossal words in vintage fonts showing the inevitable wear of time; a plethora of extra-urban ruins surrounded by a nature that has been reclaiming its spaces for quite a long time.
The result is the opposite of an anthropocentric film where, paradoxically, the presence of (Europe’s) humanity, of its misdeeds and fragility, is constantly before our eyes. Our story of borders and conflicts plays on without any action or script, to the rhythmic sounds of silence. As if we were floating in a limbo at the dead end of history, near-motionless images illustrate the failure of a whole architecture of dreams and delusions of grandeur, paired by an implicit sense of guilt (in few cases, directly evoked by military-looking sights like the submarine) yet inseparable from an indefinable, loving nostalgia, possibly due to the resemblance of the portrayed objects with toys – building blocks, machines, vehicles – of a universal childhood, the age when anything is possible.
An intentional playful twist, confirmed by a set of sequences showing star cutouts – the EU states – being destroyed in various ways: melted, burned down, stretched until they break. Unexpectedly, Wiesinger reveals that he traveled around Europe searching for locations that looked like precise images already existing in his mind: a selection, rather than a real discovery journey. “I wasn’t looking for signs to give meaning to“, and “you could say that the result is, in a way, the world I want“². A naive gaze, like the optimism of children and that of 20th century Europe, that pictured itself as powerful enough to do and undo whatever it wanted, control, delimit, subject all existence to its own law. Speaking of fading eras, Wiesinger points out the analog nature not only of the devices he used (16 mm film and audiocassette), but of the filmed objects, too (man-made giants, vehicles and landmarks, all still untouched by the digital), as “both things are disappearing“².
In “12 Asterisci”, avant-garde is not so much in the form, as rather in the contemporary portrait of the tangle of feelings that envelope a Europe in deep crisis. A continent that used to see itself as the guiding light of the world, outpost of civilization, now facing decadence, in search for an identity, reflecting on its history of violence. But the blame is inseparable from nostalgia, as it is impossible to avoid feeling strangely touched by familiar shapes and sights, universal elements of a “European aesthetic subconscious”.
But what about the stars? “Down on the ground, we [Europeans] have lots of problems and divisions, but up in the sky we can be completely free” explains the director about the choice of the EU flag stars³ as the film’s leitmotiv.
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¹ I had the chance to briefly speak to director Wiesinger and ask him about the visual resemblance of “12 Asterisci” with a (partially German) post punk legend: “Radio On” by Christopher Petit, 1979. The author confirmed his appreciation for the film and the reference to one of its scenes in a specific shot: the one of the three vintage gas pumps. In Petit’s film, in a strikingly similar location, the protagonist meets a rocker played by Sting.
² Translation of the director’s words in the post-screening Q&A, 18/6/2025.
³ A trivia about the very last shots of the film: the two formulas we see on the rotating film tin can are, respectively, that of centrifugal and centripetal force. From the EU flag, not only does Wiesinger borrow the stars, but the idea of a rotating circle, too. In a small, sort of stop-motion scene, the director stylizes his journey around the continent as a spiraling movement from Germany outwards, touching all the countries of the Union.
