Italy

The robots are at our doorstep. Scientists as well as tech-visionaries are certain that in a few years robots will be an integral part of our everyday life. But humanoid robots are more than just another gadget. Bearing a resemblance to living creatures in their conduct and looks, they are more like new beings on our planet. We are the Robots, shows robots interacting with humans in everyday-environments already today.

What will we gain from this new technology? And what will we lose?

Humanoid robots are like new creatures on our planet. They work at reception desks, in shopping malls or as chefs. And they are coming into our private lives…

„With an A.I., you have to keep your sentences short and to the point.“

This piece of advice is given to Chuck as he’s picking up his new robot partner Harmony fresh from the factory. Together they go on a road trip through California. As it turns out at a second glancing, the sex robot Harmony likes books and can ad lib quote Ray Kurzweil.

In Tokyo, Grandma Sakurai is introduced to the cute robot Pepper, a present from her son, so she has someone to keep her company. But soon Pepper turns out to be quite capricious, fnding the old lady’s conversation topics of little interest.

While Harmony and Chuck are searching for love, and Pepper and Grandma are killing time, pressing questions arise: How will robots and artifcial intelligence change our lives? What will we win, what will we lose? And, who will be the main actors in the future world? The documentary shows us tomorrow’s world today.

Sicily, summer. A wall of barbed wire separates the biggest refugee camp in Europe from a deserted, unwelcoming hinterland. The camp is the CARA of Mineo. Here migrants are blocked in endless waits, with their lives dotted with dreamy, absurd, even comical situations.

Near the camp fence we meet Mohammad, who wants to run away; Aqib and Malik who dream of reaching Milan and joining its LGBTQI scene; Ibrahim, the hypnotic musician waiting for his documents; Dieudonne “le prophète” who harshly denounces the poor condition of the asylum seekers.

But the CARA is not just a place for migrants. Here we find unauthorized merchants, improvised tailors, flushed military personnel patrolling a porous frontier and squads of American Jehovah Witnesses. Above all, a patronizing Director who strives to maintain an impossible order.

“Notes from CARA” is the collective portrait of a human microcosm set in the biggest refugee camp ever built on the Italian side of the Mediterranean Sea.

10/7  10:00

Nico is a young graphic designer who lives in Bagheria, the more populated town in the province of Palermo. Nico is also a boy strongly tied to his land. Here he learns that to discover them and to tear them to the oblivion it has been a Palermitan man, born in 1841 and died in 1916: Giuseppe Pitrè. Nico is mainly affected by a photo of the man, a portrait next to the graffiti. Something snaps in him: the appearance of Pitrè is likely to be immediately to transformed into a character to draw on paper. Very soon the plan of Nico becomes to tell a graphic novel, the human story of Pitrè, medical doctor which for years has travelled to Sicily incessantly in order to collect, catalogue and put under observation the uses and customs, objects, songs, stories, festivities and all that came from the sicilian popular world. While drawing often on the road, returning to the places where little Pitrè had grown Nico meets different people all ideally but also directly involved in the world of Pitrè: Peppe, one of the last remaining fishermen of pescespada living on the Strait of Messina still attacked to a job that is likely to disappear; Doctor Affronti who assists the immigrants of today; Silvia, one of many girls who play santa rosalia in the processione of the festino; Nino Cuticchio, heir to the tradition of the Sicilian Puppets; father. They are some of the personages who Nico meets on his way.