My friend David Kong,
on break from college, spent part of last summer in Macerata, Italy. Being
an outstanding young filmmaker, he made this beautiful short film celebrating
the town that he had come to love.
I shot this film of a small hill-town in Italy in order to give the
rest of the world a taste of its enthralling natural and anthropological
beauty, a simple exercise in non-narrative video technique.
The current city
is over a thousand years old, built on the ruins of an ancient one, and home to
one of the oldest universities in Italy.
Take a few moments to soak in this marvelous 6 minute film.
David was, of course,
a stranger to Macerata and so appreciated it as something exotic and different.
That makes sense. What fascinated me was the responses he received from the
people who live in Macerata. The film reminded many that their hometown, the place they take for granted, is very
beautiful.
Familiarity, they
say, breeds contempt. Well, maybe not always contempt, but certainly a kind of
blindness to the wonders we pass by every day. When we see these through the
eyes of a stranger looking at them for the first time, they can come to life
again as they did for people in Macerata.
We can also put
ourselves in the mindset of a stranger, of a tourist seeking to discover the
wonders in our own backyards for the first time. If we do, we will, I’m
certain, find wonders and find ourselves strangely refreshed.
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