Pupi Avati – Magnificat (1993)
During the Middle Ages, a traveling executioner hires an apprentice to learn the finer points of torture and execution, and a young girl is given by her parents to a Catholic convent.
In an unknown area of the central Apennines, during the Holy Week of the year 926, a half-dozen stories intertwine, for which acts as thread the route of the Executioner Folco and his assistant. They all converge to Malfole, to the abbey of the Visitation.
In almost liturgical cadences, P. Avati, bizarre and anomalous director from Bologna, reconstructs a time that’s feral and, together, bathed in the dimension of the sacred where are alternated rites, omens, superstitions, mysteries, fears, punishments, a world dominated by the looming violence, by the presence of death, by the idea of God, eternal deaf-mute.
Hard to say whether it is a secular or religious film, it surely is the highest result in the twenty-year career of Avati.
(Morandini)
Presented in competition at the 46th Cannes Film Festival, it’s considered by many critics as the best film by Pupi Avati. And the judgment seems well founded.
“I went up to a thousand years ago to find a time when faith was essential to fill the silence of God, which was then identical to what it is today. […] It was such and so great the need to find an interlocutor that transcended things and people in order to make sense out of a life so wretched and brutal, to find a way for living and hoping.”
Magnificat.1993.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-cinepth.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 32 min
Size: 7.39 GiB
Video
Codec: h264
Resolution: 1920x1040
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Frame rate: 25.000 fps
Bit rate: 11.2 Mb/s
BPP: 0.224
Audio
#1: Italian 2.0ch E-AC-3 @ 224 kb/s
Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English, Italian
