A trilogy closes with Il desiderio di essere inutile – Hugo a Venezia (Hugo in Venice – A Yearning to Be of No Use), Stefano Knuchel’s documentary screening Saturday, September 12, the final special out-of-competition presentation jointly signed by the International Critics’ Week and Giornate degli Autori.
“I come and go across the world, almost without a destination”: the line belongs to Hugo Pratt, and it’s the half everyone quotes. Less known is what came after – the cartoonist added that he always returned to Venice. It’s this second movement, the homecoming rather than the escape, that shapes the third and final chapter of the portrait Stefano Knuchel has been building around Pratt for nearly twenty years: after Hugo in Africa (2009, Bisato d’Oro for best director in Orizzonti) and Hugo in Argentina (2021, Giornate degli Autori), Hugo in Venice closes the series in the city that gave rise to it, a year ahead of the centenary of the author’s birth, in 2027.
The documentary directed by Stefano Knuchel and produced by Fiumi Film concludes the trilogy (which began with Hugo in Africa, 2009, and continued with Hugo in Argentina, 2021) dedicated to one of the masters of auteur comics, Hugo Pratt (1927–1995). Archiv...
Produced by Fiumi Film in coproduction with RSI, the documentary (Switzerland, 100′) moves between three places – Venice of the origins, the Pacific of adventure, Switzerland of the final years – drawing on archival material, photographs, unpublished documents, and recordings of conversations between Pratt and his biographer Dominique Petitfaux, who appears in the film alongside Patrizia Zanotti, the cartoonist’s longtime collaborator, and Thierry Thomas and Marco Steiner.
The title, too, has a double root. On one side, it stakes a claim for comics as an art form, long treated as a minor genre before Pratt lifted it onto literary ground; on the other, it echoes an idea dear to the creator of Corto Maltese – that imagination shouldn’t have to answer to anyone for its usefulness. The screening is at 3pm in the Sala Casinò at the Palazzo del Casinò, a few hours before the Golden Lion is awarded in the Sala Grande.
