12/08/2021 - Director Giovanni Cioni uses the tale of a famous but controversial 1920s scientist to take an askance look at the history of migration on the French and Italian border

With From the Planet of the Humans [+see also:
trailer
interview: Giovanni Cioni
film profile], director, narrator and cameraman Giovanni Cioni (Planetarium, Nous/Autres) has made a unique film exploring migration on the French and Italian border. At its heart is the bizarre and bewildering story of Serge Voronoff, who had a villa with spectacular views of the Ventimiglia border. A mix of oral history, fairytale and science-fiction, the film is playing out of competition at the Locarno Film Festival.

From the Planet of the Humans starts as a silent movie with intertitles telling us that this is a fairytale that happened once upon a time and in our time. That's about right for a film that starts in 2017 and then drifts back to the 20s and 30s to give a potted history of migration over the past century. A point-of-view camera then takes us on a journey over beautiful blue waves reminding us of the hardships endured by refugees fleeing wars in North Africa at the time. Cioni's voiceover recalls Godard's Alphaville, suggesting that this is a dystopian nightmare. However, the photographs, the archival footage and the images of frogs singing are taken from reality, and although it is a peculiar world, it is our world.

When, in January 2017, Cioni decided to travel to the border to see for himself the migrants he heard about on the news, he was surprised to discover silence. There was no one on the streets – they were empty. He felt as though the silence he witnessed at Ventimiglia station, the last stop before Italy turns into France, was the worst sound he had ever heard. He saw some migrants studying a timetable. But was this the horror of migration he had heard about? 

Cioni takes a train to Menton-Garavan station, where border police take suspected migrants off the train. A friend comes to pick up Cioni and the director learns about immigrants who have died trying to cross the border. His interest is piqued when he sees some monkey cages, which have been there since the 1920s. Cioni starts to learn and recount the story of Voronoff, who was world-famous back then. He was a colonialist living in a magnificent villa on top of the hill who thought nothing of taking photographs of young girls with the skulls of the dead. The French surgeon gained fame for his technique of grafting monkey testicle tissue on men for purportedly therapeutic purposes. A song in a Marx Brothers film refers to him. Cioni is fascinated by him but is just as interested in all the migrants who walked on the paths surrounding his now dilapidated villa.

The film plays out like a tale being told. The Italian director dares the audience to believe it is real. Voronoff kept frogs in a tank, singing to each other; his monkeys sometimes escaped. Through allegory and metaphor, Cioni links this colonialist's life with the poor treatment of migrants in the present. While the film is an acquired taste and treads the line between gallery and cinema, it's always on the right side of interesting, with Cioni's dulcet tones somehow conveying both reverie and nightmare.

From the Planet of the Humans was produced by GraffitiDoc, with Iota Production and Tag Film as co-producers.