Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio, twins born in Turin in 1978, are directors and visual artists who have been collaborating since 1999. Their best-known works include Sette opere di misericordia (2011), which debuted in the international competition at the Locarno Film Festival and was nominated for three Nastri d’Argento awards. This was followed by I ricordi del fiume (2015) and Spaccapietre (2020), both screened at major international festivals, cementing their reputation as authors of rigorous, civil and poetic cinema. The protagonists of De Serio’s works are often uprooted or marginal identities, grappling with a continuous redefinition of self or collective identities, in a hybrid production that ranges between documentary cinema, staging and art installations. Their latest work, Ephemeral Canon (2025), was presented at the Berlinale Forum as the only Italian production selected in that section. The film is an eleven-chapter documentary that explores endangered musical and oral traditions in different Italian regions, from Liguria to Calabria, from Marche to Sicily. Through still shots in a 1:1 square format and skillful use of sound, De Serio offers an in-depth look at local identities and orally handed down practices highlighting the beauty of the cultural resilience of local communities. The film was produced by La Sarraz Pictures, with support from MIC – Direzione Generale Cinema e Audiovisivo, Film Commission Torino Piemonte – Piemonte Doc Film Fund, and Acqua Foundation. We interviewed them for TheNewyorker.
The documentary has been described as a work that, while rigorous in its ethnographic research, manages to engage a wider audience through its engaging visual and aural storytelling, how did you achieve this?
From the very beginning, we wanted to work on a double register: on the one hand, deep listening to oral and sound traditions, with the rigor of ethnographic research that would faithfully restore cultural contexts and practices; on the other hand, the construction of an immersive cinematic experience, capable of engaging the viewer not only intellectually, but also emotionally and sensorially.We chose to use fixed framing in a square format and a treatment of sound to create a suspended, almost meditative time that would allow us to enter into the gestures and voices of the people filmed. In this way, the narrative is not entrusted to a classical development, but to the evocative power of images and sounds, which become protagonists. Perhaps it is precisely this balance between rigor and suggestion that allows the film to speak even to those unfamiliar with the musical repertoires or contexts documented. It is a work that comes from listening, and hopefully generates listening.
The choice not to entrust the narrative to a single, external voice to guide the viewer is striking…
Ephemeral canon is a tribute to local specificities, and therefore to their differences – that is why we did not want to impose a single voice, but to let the chorality emerge on its own, in correspondences, internal rhymes, shared gestures. It is a film that entrusts visual and sound language with the task of restoring dignity and complexity to traditions that are often reduced to folklore, but which are instead alive, mobile, contemporary. To standardize everything would have meant betraying precisely the nature of the different voices and the protagonists themselves. That is why we chose to enhance as much as possible the fragmentation, the nonlinearity even at the cost, at times, of dwelling only briefly on one character and then moving elsewhere. Despite this movement, the goal was still to restore a fresco, something that held the voices together through a deep correspondence. We can call this a polyphony, or better yet, a polyvocality.
You have connected very different generations, from the very old to the very young, a powerful gesture that opens up questions about time, memory and the shared present. Was this a natural process?
The incipit of our work was to want to preserve the image of an Italy made of memory, often invisible, but with the goal of showing the endurance of a tradition that depends on the people who continue to carry it on. The film is about something that existed in a specific time, but that today is up to us to decide whether to let it die or to let it survive. It is a work on memory, of course, but it is also an act to keep it alive. To make people survive, their faces, their voices, their traditions, their ways of being. Working with two, often three, such different generations was precisely what made us want to make Ephemeral Canon, and it was a completely natural process: we did not just want to collect what is gone, but to give space to what is enduring, struggling-sometimes desperately-to be passed on. We think of kids learning to sing in the old-fashioned way by listening to old cell phone recordings: a culture that seemed to be disappearing and instead, thanks to them, is being kept alive. This for us means speaking to future generations as well. It is not a future of homogenization, but a future of cultural richness and diversity. The idea of recovering one’s roots, because roots are not an epitaph of what has been, but are instead a claim to what one wants to continue to be.
After such immersive work, what do you take with you, as artists but also as people?
We carry with us a different awareness of time. Working so long inside these territories, listening to voices that often find no space elsewhere, has forced us to slow down, to tune in to a more human rhythm. It is something that changes you. As artists, it made us reflect on what “listening” really means, not just recording or documenting, but entering into relationship, putting ourselves in deep listening. And as people, it left us with a form of gratitude: for those who welcomed us, for those who shared songs, silences, stories. We understood that the artistic gesture can also be a gesture of giving back. And this will also accompany us in future work.
The article “Ephemeral Canon”: memory that endures lands in New York comes from TheNewyorker.
