Unzalab is a no-profit indipendent film Lab in Milan. The main activity of the collective consists in organizing workshops and events focused on promoting photochemical filmmaking; more than that, Unzalab also provides basic lab facilities for lab members (membership is open, of course), such as a dark room equiped with lomotanks for handprocessing film, some bolex h16 camera, projectors and a 16mm editing table (used as diy contact printer too).
During the “Weekend On the Moon” we will take care of 16mm screenings and present a new version of Canti Neri (by Tiziano Doria & Samira Guadagnuolo), which was entirely made at Unzalab.

CANTI NERI (Black Songs)
installation by WarshadFilm, artistic duo from UnzaLab
Tiziano Doria & Samira Guadagnuolo, Italy | 2019 | 16mm | color-b\n | 2-4 projectors 🎥 16mm

A poetic recollection of a personal and collective memory, the work dissects, decomposes, fragments, distills and then re-creates anew – in a time that beats in repeated rythm, slow and circular – the dream of an ancestral childhood, of nomadic shepherds and tangled bushes of war and raids, and in this magnified gaze, the film wonders about the meaning and the nature of it’s own observations.
Canti Neri (Black Songs) comes from the analysis of a private and family archive, of our property, of which we have selected some frames transposing them from S8mm to 16mm.
The original films have been combined in a new way, focusing on details that had escaped from the eye of the operator, on the periphery of the image, extrapolating details, dissolving the flow of action and reiterating it in a dilated time.
And it is not just a matter of recalling a private memory, but also and above all, a social and collective memory linked to the colonial history of our country: blind attemps at conquest and repression, chronicles of war, failures reiterated and buried in a complex and imponderable reality, distant and profoundly different, emblem of the difficulty of discerning and understanding, where even the most recent ideals of liberation where born, were betrayed and then corrupted.
And yet, finally, a rich memory, which transforms and becomes possibility, redemption, allegorical childhood, immaginative and poetic well.