Giorgio Ferrero - Beautiful Things

Van is a floorhand, the maintenance man on an oil rig. He works in the desert, at a large oilfield in Texas. Danilo is the chief engineer of a freighter. He spends all his days in the heart of the vessel where a humongous engine resides. Andrea is a scientist. He has lived his whole life between mathematical formulae and the silence of the anechoic chamber. Vito has spent half of his life looking after slot machines. Today he is in charge of an immense reinforced-concrete pit for waste. These men, unwittingly, provide the basis for the whole sequence of creation, transport, marketing and destruction of the objects that feed our bulimic lifestyle. The objects that we think we need every day begin and end their journey inside isolated and eerie industrial and scientific locations. These men are monks in temples of steel and concrete and carry out the same mechanical rituals every day in silence and solitude, sharing the space with their own phantoms. She and He are an ordinary couple. They have spent their life accumulating stuff to the point of saturation. They grew up in the boom years of commercial television, and they are the first generation to have been freed from it by the internet. Today they are in their forties and are looking for a way out. She and He are us. And we have never heard about them.

Beautiful Things is a journey, a story in four acts in which images, words and sounds are inseparable from one another; it has been written like a piece of music, as if it were a score in which notes, images and words have the same weight and each seeks its own geometry between the lines. The film is dedicated to everyone like us who does not know how to live without collecting stuff. To us toxic, spoiled, bulimic accumulators. We who are unable to live in silence. We who accept the idea that life can come before us but not that our objects can outlive us. This film is a way of escaping a lifestyle from which we can find no way out. In the film we have tried to express all our sadness, the urgency of the need to go back to breathing in silence, free from the constriction of a life swallowed up by noise. This is our howl and we have tried to turn it into a song.Beautiful Things is a journey, a story in four acts in which images, words and sounds are inseparable from one another; it has been written like a piece of music, as if it were a score in which notes, images and words have the same weight and each seeks its own geometry between the lines. The film is dedicated to everyone like us who does not know how to live without collecting stuff. To us toxic, spoiled, bulimic accumulators. We who are unable to live in silence. We who accept the idea that life can come before us but not that our objects can outlive us. This film is a way of escaping a lifestyle from which we can find no way out. In the film we have tried to express all our sadness, the urgency of the need to go back to breathing in silence, free from the constriction of a life swallowed up by noise. This is our howl and we have tried to turn it into a song.