Director’s note
Miserable Breath Miserable Flesh stems from the desire to depict recurring patterns in human experience: the transformation of fear into violence, of faith into guilt, of community into a place of oppression. The film is grounded in historical research based on chronicles, religious texts, and local testimonies from the seventeenth century. Among its main sources, Il memorando contagio seguito in Bergamo l’anno 1630 by Lorenzo Ghirardelli offered an essential key to understanding the plague as a daily experience, a widespread fear, and a form of normalized violence. The images, created through generative artificial intelligence tools, emerge from a process of writing and formal control in which narrative, composition, setting, light, gesture, and rhythm are defined before generation. The directing approach was primarily aimed at reducing as much as possible the influence of uncontrollable variables and the automatisms inherent in generative tools. The synthetic nature of faces and bodies is not concealed: the characters are marked by an incomplete presence, by a suspended vitality, and it is precisely this quality that makes them suited to a drama about transience, the vanity of existence, and human fragility. They appear as worn, emptied figures, already poised on the threshold between body and relic, between person and simulacrum. This creates an effect that would be difficult to achieve in the same way through a physically embodied performance. Starting from images deprived of material substance, the work sought to restore density, weight, and a filmic sense of presence. The synthetic origin of the images thus establishes a mournful and unsettling distance between the viewer and the simulacrum.