On 1 June 2009 a passenger plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. My cousin Georg, returning from Brazil, was among the 228 dead. He grew up as an adopted child in a small Italian village in the midst of the Dolomites; he had travelled to the city of Salvador da Bahia on the coast of Brazil in search of his biological mother. Seven years later his adoptive brother, Markus, crosses the ocean to follow Georg’s footprints into his own past.
FESTIVAL VITA
9th iREP International Documentary Film Festival Lagos
25th Visioni Italiane Bologna
42nd Mostra Internacional de Cinema São Paulo
60th DOK Leipzig
28th Cinema del Film Africano Milano
32nd Bolzano Filmfestival Bozen
15th Dokumentarfilmwoche Hamburg
47th Sehsüchte Film Festival
66th Trento Film Festival
2nd Migranti Film Festival
17th Euganea Film Festival
1st Dolomitale Opening Film
AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS
VisioniDOC Award for Best Documentary | Visioni Italiane Bologna
D.E-R. Award | Visioni Italiane Bologna
Best Documentary | Migranti Film Festival Italy
Best Documentary | Euganea Film Festival Italy
Nomination for Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize | DOK Leipzig
Nomination for Euregio Student Prize | Bolzano Filmfestival
LEADING TO OURSELVES
With his film “The Fifth Point of the Compass”, Martin Prinoth goes in search of his own roots while at the same time leading us into the world outside. In an impressive, very intimate fashion we take part as spectators in a cinematic expedition, at the centre of which fate stands and becomes almost microscopically visible. Why do we live where we live? Into which life are we born and where does it lead us? Which circumstances guide us into a life that then becomes ours? These are questions that the film also asks of us as viewers. Once we begin to follow these trails, the mysterious, the incomprehensible becomes ever clearer. We try to search out a mosaic that might perhaps make sense in order however to understand ever more clearly on our way there that we will probably only obtain a vague idea of it.
The filmmaker offers his protagonist this film as a medium and a means of transport to delve into his own life story. We experience the emotional process between the two men and hope along with them that the hidden may be revealed, just as the mountains at the beginning the film emerge from the clouds to reveal the setting. The film’s two languages, Ladin and Brazilian Portuguese, could hardly be geographically further apart: the one spoken in the enclave formed by a South Tyrolean mountain valley, the other on the coast of a distant continent. And yet I can feel how close together they are and interweave with one another through the biographies of two children. The emotional strength of Martin Prinoth’s film lies in its obstinate search to get to the origins of the story and find an answer to numerous questions. The Fifth Point of the Compass leads to ourselves.
Nicolas Humbert
JURY STATEMENTS
“For having been able to build a solid, engaging and sometimes very emotional story on the topic of eradication and the search for identity. At his first feature film, the young director highlights his personal stylistic research that, even if still under definition, looks at the great masters, and especially Werner Herzog, to find an original relationship with the filmic matter that reflects and analyzes itself.”
Best Documentary at Euganea film festival
“Because with realism sometimes disturbing, traces the boundaries of a world only apparently liberating as that of adoptions. The contrast between the peaceful village of the Dolomites and the alienating Brazilian road, from which the three orphans come from, is very effective, describing an opaque border where identities are confused and nothing is resolved on any front. Markus, the adult condemned to remain a child because without roots, leads us to walk on an impervious path and shows it as it is: it can lead somewhere or not, we have to walk.”
Best Documentary at Migranti film festival