As part of our Filmmaker residency, Emilia Mello will be presenting “Il Mundo Perduto” this Thursday!

Heralded by Martin Scorsese as “an anthropologist who speaks with the voice of a poet,” Italian director Vittorio De Seta produced a string of extraordinary short documentaries in the 1950s that distill their subjects to pure cinema. Shooting in vivid color, De Seta captured the rhythms and rituals of life among the fishermen, miners, shepherds, and farmers who continued to live and work according to the preindustrial traditions of their ancestors. Presented without voiceover so that the rhapsodic visuals speak for themselves, these miniature marvels stand as essential, ennobling records of a vanished world.