Collaboration with Ettore Siracusaon Giorgio Mangiamele’s film Il Contratto

The Museo Italiano (Co.As.It.) is collaborating with art film maker Ettore Siracusa on a project based on Giorgio Mangiamele’s Italian Australian classic film Il Contratto (1953).

The project

Ettore Siracusa, a contemporary video artist with a long standing association with Giorgio Mangiamele, is undertaking research for the production of a video art piece based on Il Contratto.

As part of this project, Ettore intends to conduct a series of video interviews with:

1. Italian migrants who appear in the film, and their relatives or friends;
2. People who remember Mangiamele as a photographer or film director in the 1950s;
3. Italian migrants who arrived and lived in Melbourne in the 1950s.

As well as being utilized within Ettore’s video art piece, the video interviews will be included in the Co.As.It. Italian Historical Society and Museo Italiano collection and made available, as documents of a crucial period in the history of the Italian Australian community and of the activity of one our community’s most talented artists. 

How to participate

If you are interested in contributing to this project please contact the Co.As.It. italian Historical Society: 9349 9021; [email protected]or Ettore Siracusa: 0439 569 144; [email protected]

Archival information and film clips for Il Contratto from these web links:

http://aso.gov.au/titles/features/il-contratto/notes/

https://vimeo.com/ettoresiracusa/videos

List of actors who appear in Il Contratto

Ettore Siracusa

Ettore is an art film maker based in Melbourne and Sydney. His short films and video works articulate the figure of the migrant as a central poetical trope, social entity and human subject, to explore cinematic concerns in notions of place making, cultural memory and archives.

Currently a doctoral candidate in studio-based research at the Sydney College of the Arts (University of Sydney), Ettore has taught film and art in secondary schools, been a tutor in cinema studies at Monash University, and an Associate Research Fellow at the Australian Centre of the University of Melbourne. He has recently returned from Brussels where he collaborated in the Sound Image Culture Project.

Ettore has a long standing association with Giorgio Mangiamele, both as an actor and as a collaborator.

Ettore’s filmography includes: Trails of Things Past and Passing (2013, 10:39mins, HD video); Film Cans (2013, installation); Museo Italiano (with English subtitles) (2011, 10mins, video); At the Museum of Migrations (2010, script for dual screen video); Picture Palaces (2003, video multi-screen installation at ACMI, Federation Square); Shanghai Daily (2001, 20mins, video documentary); Jadi Jadian (1998, 50mins, video for stage projection); Lecce: locations for unmade film (1997, 25mins, video); The House of Doctor Duende (1997, 28mins, video); Italians at Home (1991, 29mins, 16mm, col.); The Occupant (1984, 25mins, 16mm, col.) co-directed with Peter Lyssiotis and Michael Karris; Natura Morta (1980, 14mins, 16mm, col.); Short Story (1974, 8mins, 16mm, b&w); Lost (1971, 5mins, 16mm, b&w); Yours Faithfully (1969, 5mins, 16mm, b&w).