MISERO SOFFIO MISERA CARNE
Miserable Breath Miserable Flesh
Written and directed by Stefano P. Testa
AI Short, Italy, 2026, 17′

Music by: Cancervo
AI video generation, editing, post production: Stefano P. Testa
Production: Lab 80 film
In collaboration with: FIC Federazione Italiana Cineforum, Mafarka Film

Synopsis
Italian Alps, 1630. The arrival of the plague in a small village shatters every fragile balance. The disease takes hold of bodies, homes, and relationships, slowly turning the community into a sick organism ruled by fear and suspicion. Without dialogue, through symbolic images and repeated gestures, the film observes the disintegration of a world in which every bond begins to crack and nature remains indifferent to human suffering. Misero Soffio Misera Carne is a dark and timeless portrait of the fragility of existence and of the violence that emerges when every order begins to collapse.

Screenings
CULT! Auditorium / Bergamo, Italy, 2026

Director’s note
Misero Soffio Misera Carne does not arise from the desire to reconstruct a historical event, but from the urge to observe a recurring human mechanism: the transformation of fear into violence, of faith into guilt, of the 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, Lorenzo Ghirardelli’s Il memorando contagio seguito in Bergamo l’anno 1630 offered an essential key to understanding the plague as a daily experience, a widespread fear, and a form of normalized violence. These materials are not illustrated in a didactic way, but absorbed into the film’s symbolic and visual structure. The images, created through generative artificial intelligence tools, emerge from a process of writing and formal control in which composition, light, gesture, and rhythm are defined before generation. AI is not used here as an automatism, but as a staging space through which to shape an imaginary world that is historically and visually coherent. The original score by Cancervo, a band from San Pellegrino Terme, arises from the same territory as the film and extends its tension through slow, layered, and obsessive sounds.