francesco zanatta






la Piave ▸

    derive del medio corso
    notturno fluviale (meditazione sul rumore)
    pensare un fiume
    diario per un fiume

unidentified
il tempo porta via tutte le cose
in attesa
viva la notte






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unidentified2025 | digital | color and b/w | sound




screenings

16/11/2025 | Filmmaker Fest | Milano, IT
15/2/2026 | Ribalta Experimental Film Festival | Vignola, IT

link available on request

 From 1947 to 1969, the U.S. Air Force carried out a systematic study of unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings, codenamed “Project Blue Book.” Thousands of reports from American and European citizens were recorded during those years; more than 700 cases remained “unidentified.” The film reuses original documents from the now-declassified project, superimposing them over family footage from the same period. In the encounter between the domestic and the scientific, the familiar and the alien, a hidden portrait emerges of a nation haunted by its own astronomical obsessions.
When you explore the Project Blue Book archives, you come across stories of ordinary lives suddenly interrupted by strange and inexplicable events. The mystery in these accounts is always at odds with the Air Force's attempts at cold, scientific explanation anything for which no plausible interpretation can be found is declared "unidentified." In the film, U.S. bureaucracy collides with the intimacy of home movies, which at a certain point seem to become unidentified objects themselves, losing the linearity that made them readable. The event remains unresolved, shrouded in mystery. Life goes on as if nothing had happened.


©2026 francesco zanatta