As in heaven, so on earth
In Cinema
1275 a.C. -A young girl is imprisoned in the dungeons of an abbey where an alchemist uses her for his strange experiments. Only a young amanuensis will try to free her at any cost.
2011 a.C.- A couple of young teenagers, Cris and Jessy, go missing in the woods while a young woman comes out from the middle of nowhere. During the first investigations, the police find an odd manuscript from a tomb.
Today.- Leonardo, the Chief inspector of the Police department, is in charge of the investigation of the two teenagers disappearance. He’s compelled to leave his video-testimony, because in the light of his last findings, he fears for his own life.
Three stories in three different storylines, this is the narrative structure of the film. Apparently far from each other but during the course of the film a common intertwining will be revealed.
Three different storylines narrated with three different languages: the contemporary part is developed as a long interview/testimony (like an investigative documentary); the part set in 2011, is reconstructed throughout the cellphone footage done by the teenagers themselves before they went missing (found footage); and the part taken place in the Middle Ages: a claustrophobic reconstruction (in animation) of the story told by a young amanuensis and his desperate vicissitudes, written down in his “testament” that was retrieved from a tomb.
Three different languages used to rebuilt a “fictitious” fact that is filled with strong connotations and real references, wanting to push away as much as possible the concept of “suspension of disbelief”, trying , on the contrary, to lead the spectator towards a constructed and assembled “realism” in order to fascinate him and intrigue him as well as to disorient him, by transforming the film itself, becoming an essential piece to add to the previous investigations, almost as a “metafilm”.
The Director
Francesco Erba was born in Bergamo in 1986, where he spent his entire childhood and attended the State Art School and he graduated with specialization in “sculpture” in 2005. Accomplished the Arts Baccalaureat, he decided to follow his dream and he moved to Rome, where attended the Motion-Picture Direction Course, at NUCT in Cinecittà. He postgraduated in 2007 with the short film “Asylum” that was shown around the world in many festivals. Later he directed many animation projects, tv series pilots and videoclips and in 2014 released “Adam and Eve raised cain”, a stop-motion animation short film. “As in Heaven, so on Earth” is his first feature film.
