The meetings between photographer Fabio Donato and director Giordano Acquaviva took place over the course of a year. An intimate dialogue was spontaneously born between the two, allowing them to explore, with photography as their starting point, the indivisible dichotomy Art/Life.
Donato’s studio is crowded with stories. Every photo stirs a spontaneous phenomenology that contains the spirit of a unique dialogue, never dogmatic or superficial. The road remains two-way as it follows the dialectic of the encounter.
Parallel to Donato’s story-telling is a fil rouge extending the entire length of the film: music from “Dialogues of the Present”, an album by Luciano Cilio, Donato’s composer friend who committed suicide in the early 1980s.
The album choice is no coincidence: Donato is constantly accompanied by it while working in his studio.
Notes for a film: Dialogues with Fabio Donato is the same length as Cilio’s album. This, in fact, is the key for entering into Fabio Donato’s story, co-starred by encounters with artists such as Eduardo DeFilippo, Julian Beck, Hermann Nitsch and Nino Longobardi, as well as other distinguished figures on the international cultural scene, such as Lucio Amelio and Peppe Morra.
Fabio Donato’s artistic exploration began with no clear separation between art and life, no small inspiration for making a film about him.
The film shows how Fabio Donato’s story is entwined with that of Luciano Cilio. Above all else, however, it seeks to trace the creative process that allows reality to create a work of art.