The Story

On the Italian coast of the Adriatic sea, during the 70's, Gibo,
a young man, decides to leave his wife and son to follow another love:
Yonna, a Danish girl.
To find the money to join her in Denmark,
he fishes mussels and lives in a hut on the beach.
Three mentors follow his spiritual and material journey:
a Jesuit, an anarchist and the "crazy man" of the river.

Charlotte Skouby (Yonna), Umberto Giovannini (Gibo)

Tanabèss

Not even the oldest Romagnol-Italian dictionary will give you this word:
tanabèss is a child's mixing of tanabé, tanabèd (inability to understand)
with the rustling of a snake among the riverbank nettles, nocturnal thoughts.
Tanabèss then: the passage, with judgement suspended,
from adolescence to maturity or from maturity to senescence.
Initiatory, desperate, solitary.

Roberto Barbanti (the priest)

Walter Pretolani (Libero, the anarcho-communist)

Remo Rivola (Bubus, the river "god")

Nothing is in its place any more.
The master of books (the priest), the ideologist (the anarcho-communist)
the master of sense (the river "god"):
this is the journey of an ordinary young man (Gibo) in the Romagna of the 70's.
From adolescence to adulthood everyone speaks,
everyone teaches, the distant gods listen and send godfearing messengers.
The boy, the man, the one obliged to be, to understand, to know
(the fairytale prince put to the test, the solitary lord of himself who pays for everything)
goes through/lives through his odyssey without ever turning back,
solaced only by the certainty of existing.

Bedlù Cerchiai (Orcio), Umberto Giovannini (Gibo)

Gibo is the simple communication of the experience of anyone,
and he takes on characteristics of the exceptional
only at the moment in which first the writing,
then the cinecamera highlight his salient features.
It is the cinema that makes Gibo the character of a time
that has too much critical awareness and not much will to give value
to experience lived without emphasis or rhetoric.

Neither hero nor antihero, only a careful look at everyday life
that is slipping away, that is not making history.
Tanabèss encounters the Orlando and part of its worlds,
it draws on that world well known to most Romagnol adults
which by now has been forfeited to the impossibility of narration,
the vitriol of boredom, the stupidity of television.
All that remained was to stick the blade right in
and let what was considered useless, superfluous,
obsolete drip out in clots of images.
The priest, the madman, the anarchist redefine a world
just torn from the body like an article of clothing,
only just left behind by a generation heading inexorably towards the sunset.
Bringing back these clots of memory to the attention of those
who know nothing about them (young and not so young)
is an operation of simple poetic testimony.