Exterior Day |


by Giulia Magno


Italy, 2022, 8 min

WRITTEN & DIRECTED by Giulia Magno
CINEMATOGRAPHY | Giulia Magno
EDITING | Giulia Magno
SOUND DESIGN | Andrea Guastadisegni
PRODUCED BY | Distretto Cinema
In COLLABORATION with Archivio Michelangelo Antonioni
Inspired by a famous exchange of letters between Michelangelo Antonioni and Mark Rothko, Esterno giorno is an experimental love letter to Italian cinema. Embarking on an intimate journey in the footsteps of the characters played by Monica Vitti, the filmmaker poetically intertwines contemporary footage shot across Italy and the Jordanian desert with excerpts from Antonioni’s films, creating an illusion of continuity between past and present. From a metaphoric desert (the industrial area of Ravenna, where film masterpiece Red Desert was shot in 1964) to a real one, the physical spaces explored by the camera become psychological landscapes, states of mind, atmospheres. As the camera lingers on the architecture of La Cupola – the futuristic house in Sardinia designed by avant-garde architect Dante Bini in the 1960s for Antonioni and Vitti, then real-life partners – the line between reality and fiction starts to blur.