There is a store in Palermo unlike any other called Quir, a place of love defying any convention. The owners are Massimo and Gino, who have been together for forty-two years, perhaps the longest-lasting gay couple in Italy. Their small leather goods store has become an important meeting place of the local LGBTQI+ scene – here people chat about their love stories or seek advice – fighting for acceptance in Sicily, a stronghold of patriarchal culture.
QUIR – A Palermo Love Story
What the critics say
«Director Nicola Bellucci captures all the unprejudiced love and struggle for civil rights of a neighborhood queer store. The Quir becomes an exciting microcosm full of colorful, heartwarming and conscience-awakening characters.»
Martina Volpato, Taxidrivers.it
«Like in the depicted city, an atmosphere of death prevails through the film Quir, but it is a film about death that celebrates life; it is a film bursting with life that does not forget death and succeeds in the difficult task of speaking secularly of rebirth, if not of actual resurrection… Nicola Bellucci sees his film as a gesture of love, finding an echo in the words that actor Massimo Verdastro recites at Massimo and Gino’s political wedding. They are verses by Nino Gennaro, a poet from Corleone who died of AIDS in 1995 and who wrote dazzling aphorisms such as «either you are happy or you are complicit,» to be found in his «jewel-active booklets» that he personally distributed to friends. It goes like this, «to love only / always / without ever hating each other.» And also, «where reason cannot / may the madness of a heart in love be able to.» With equal simplicity Quir speaks of struggle and beauty, of eccentricity and revolution: of the life, of love.»
Andrea Inzerillo, Ilmanifesto.it
«The film is a testimony to a relationship that, though thwarted, manages to convey love and acceptance toward anyone who wants to be themselves while respecting the freedom of others.»
Carmela Ieni, viviroma.it
«The viewer finds himself immersed in the atmosphere of the leather store that gives the film its title, a kind of confessional that over the years has become an important meeting point of the local LGBTQI+ scene. This is where friends like Ernesto, Vivian, and Charly meet, all people who are not described in the film but brought out through the gestures of their daily lives, which are in fact political acts of fighting for their rights in a Sicily – and in an Italy – still dominated by a patriarchal culture.
Bellucci lets us into their homes and lets us breathe in their love, difficulties, moments of mourning and existential reflections on the masculine and the feminine. There are also testimonies from young trans and gay men, giving the measure of how much the condition of this community has changed in the last forty years, but also how certain aspects remain unchanged.»
Cristiana Allievi, Corriere della Sera
«Quir by Nicola Bellucci is a portrait of some characters of Palermo’s LGBTQI+ community and, through them, of an increasingly multiform and multiethnic city. A world as colorful and shiny as the bags in the protagonists‘ leather store, happy existences proud of their own declination of sexuality, but behind them also a great and historical militancy made of many demonstrations and struggles for civil rights. (…) Quir embraces the passage of time, the passage between generations. It is a film about the human beauty of its characters, studded with humorous moments that keep the work in a light tone.»
Giampiero Raganelli, Quinlan
«Massimo Milani and Gino Campanella’s love has lasted for decades. They helped shape the beginnings of the gay movement in Italy and run one of the country’s most important scene locations in Palermo, right in the heart of conservative Sicily. Anyone who enters their store is looked after – and above all, can’t avoid their lively discussions. Because the scene is on fire!Filmmaker Nicola Bellucci has created a cinematic monument to the couple, their surroundings, and their store, which sparkles with charm and wisdom.»
Dennis Vetter, 41th Kasseler Dokfest
«Quir celebrates a vibrant Palermo in constant change, a symbol of a community that looks to the future with hope despite all the difficulties. (…) In a world that often demands conformity, Quir reminds us that being oneself, without a mask, without compromise and above all without fear, means freedom.»
Eleonora Zanardi, taxidrivers.it
Director’s Statement by Nicola Bellucci
«A playful freedom that knows how to relieve tension. Which prefers the fragment to the totality. Which prefers the smile that is able to relieve the weight of reality’s weight.»
(Don Cosimo Scordato, priest of Ballarò, Palermo)
It always starts with love. This time I «fell in love» with Massimo and Gino. It started by chance, passing one day in front of Quir, their boutique in an alley in Ballarò, a neighborhood in Palermo. I soon realized that what was supposed to be a store for handbags and other leather goods was actually a kind of confessory, or an emergency room for souls in need of help – the owners with a 40 years long history of struggling for LGBT rights. So I listened, and from this microcosm the characters soon multiplied, becoming pieces of a puzzle to be built against the backdrop of a landscape (the city of Palermo). Thus came Vivian and Ernesto and then Charly as well.
«The problem is not sexual identity, but the identity of a person, who must become himself, in whatever relationship he involves himself in.»
(Massimo Milani)
I have tried to look at these lives following the lesson that it is never a matter of reproducing reality as it is, or of bending it to a pre-established ideological conception, but of filtering it through the prism of consciousness. «Realism» is never determined by the choices of the subjects (for example, the struggle for LGBT rights) but the way they are dealt with. Therefore, by freeing the camera’s gaze from predetermined points of view, without describing the characters but rather making them emerge from the pure phenomenological events in which they act, I wanted to get to the heart of the individual stories with just a few essential strokes. The connection between the characters in the film is not given by the fixation of positions or focal centers but by the movement, the restlessness between the poles, their existential precariousness. The individual stories all take place at the same time, and the transition from one to the other occurs through a series of artifices of a narrative, visual, or associative order: it will always be some detail, seemingly insignificant, that will transport us from one story to the next.
Each story goes in search of meaning aspiring, like the film, to recompose itself into a geometry whose meaning is given by the whole, by the individual fragments that through interlocking work weave the thread of the discourse. The montage thus becomes allegorical, interpretive: it also resorts to parody and irony as stylistic means. The aim was to arrive at a kind of empathetic estrangement in which the emotions of the characters manage to engage the viewers without flattening on mere naturalistic reproduction.
«Either one is happy or one is complicit»
(Nino Gennaro).
Massimo Milani often repeated to me this phrase from his poet friend who died of AIDS so many years ago, pointing out the importance of approaching gender issues from, shall we say, a «positive» point of view. As Paul Preciado rightly points out, it is about avoiding «a gaze that kills» which he calls «necropolitical» which is what is often used in the cinematic representation of the Queer world. I hope that I have succeeded in conveying in my film the active joy, as Nino Gennaro would say, that emanates from each of the bodies that cross the threshold of the Quir.
Producer’s notes by Frank Matter
As with his earlier works, a chance encounter led Nicola Bellucci to the subject of his new film. This time it happened in Sicily. It was there that he met Gino and Massimo, two pioneers of the Italian gay movement. They run a leather goods store in Palermo called Quir which is frequented by many people from the queer scene. Some of them are the protagonists of this film. Gino, Massimo, Viviane, Ernesto and Charly are very engaging, flamboyant and sharp personalities who have touching and important stories to tell and are also blessed with a lot of wit and esprit. Add to this the city of Palermo as a tremendous backdrop, garish, old, opulent, vibrant, full of tragedy and mystery. These are the perfect ingredients for a moving, politically relevant, but also very entertaining movie. At a time when the rights of trans people and homosexuals are coming under pressure again – in Italy, too – the film can create important points of identification and raise awareness. But I believe the cinematic and artistic qualities, the engaging personalities, the moods and stories of «Quir» will appeal to audiences far beyond Palermo and the LGBTQI+ scene.
News
December 11, 2024
«Quir»: Nominated for Prix du Public at Solothurn Film Festival
Nicola Bellucci’s documentary has been nominated for the Audience Award «Prix du Public» at the 60th Solothurn Film Festival. The film festival will take place in January. We’re looking forward to the Swiss Premiere with cast and crew members in Solothurn! Please find the screening schedule here .
December 10, 2024
«Quir»: BEST ITALIAN FILM OF RIDF 2024
We’re happy to announce that «Quir» wins the award for Best Film in the ITA-DOC competition of the Rome International Documentary Festival! The sold out screening has been a great success and the attending cast and crew engaged in an emotional Q&A.
December 2, 2024
«Quir» RECEIVES PRIDE AWARD
«Quir» has been awarded with the Pride Award at the Florence Queer Film Festival «for its ability to explore multiple queer identities with an authentic and empathetic approach. The film addresses the plurality of identities without ever being intrusive, using a spontaneous and delicate language. Set in Palermo, QUIR portrays a city of obvious contradictions, where moments of political reflection mingle with areas that are still far from full liberation. Its characters, reminiscent of those in a commedia dell’arte, move in a social context where the dynamics of oppression and liberation intertwine naturally and fluidly. With lightness and depth, QUIR invites reflection on the emotional and cultural nuances of the issues it deals with, without ever falling into superficiality.» (Jury: Vincenzo Restivo, Sam Bertoldi & Roberta Parigiani)
November 20, 2024
«Quir» in Florence and Rome
We’re happy to continue the «Quir» festival tour in Italy! Nicola Bellucci and the protagonists will attend both screenings: at the Florence Queer Film Festival where the film is nominated for the Pride Award and at the Rome International Documentary Festival where it’s running in the ITA-DOC competition. Please check the schedule here.
October 17, 2024
GermAN PrEMIERE oF «Quir»
In November, «Quir» will have its German premiere at the Documentary and Video Film Festival Kassel. Director Nicola Bellucci will be present for a Q&A after the screening. «A cinematic monument that sparkles with charm and wisdom» (Dennis Vetter, 41st Kasseler Dokfest).
August 29, 2024
Premiere in Brazil
«Quir» will premiere in Brazil at the MT Queer Premia 2024 and has been nominated for best documentary. The Film festival will take place from October 18 to 20 in Cuiabá.
July 3, 2024
World Premiere in Italy
On July 14th, «Quir» will have its world premiere at the 70th Taormina Film Festival in Sicily. The festival has always been a meeting place for European and American cinema in breathtaking surroundings, visited by legendary stars, providing an attractive premiere platform for both arthouse films and big Hollywood productions.
Screenings
- 60th Solothurn Film Festival:
Saturday, Jan 25, 2025, 5.15pm, Landhaus, Solothurn, Switzerland
Monday, Jan 27, 2025, 7.00pm, Konzertsaal, Solothurn, Switzerland
- Rome International Documentary Festival:
Saturday, Dec 7th, 2024, 7.30pm, Nuovo Cinema Aquila, Sala 2, Rome, Italy
- Florence Queer Festival:
Saturday, Nov 30th, 2024, 5.30pm, Cinema La Compagnia, Florence, Italy
- German premiere at the Kasseler Dokumentarfilm- und Videofest:
Saturday, Nov 16th, 2024, 11.30pm, Filmladen, Kassel, Germany
Background
Welcome to the Quir! Come in and get to know our protagonists…
Massimo Milani & Gino Campanella
Massimo Milani
Massimo and Gino met almost 50 years ago and it was love at first sight: Gino left his wife and two children and they went to live together first in Rome then in Palermo. As FUORI! (United Front of Italian Revolutionary Homosexuals) activists since the early 1970s, their lives were always marked by struggles for civil rights. After more than 40 years of love and struggle Massimo and Gino decided to marry in Giarre in memory of an event that marked the history of the LGBTQ+ movement in Italy: the murder of Giorgio and Toni, a pair of young lovers. It was this homophobic crime that gave the impulse for the birth of ARCIGAY, which Massimo and Gino helped to found in Palermo in 1980. Massimo and Gino, a couple who for decades risked everything, exposed to mockery, exclusion and violence. «Homophobia is a terrible
thing,» says Gino. «We do everything we do publicly to entice other gay people to come out.» Over the years, Massimo has subjected his body to a transformation. Some call him Massimona. He laughs and says, «At a certain point in my life I realized that there could be something in between man and woman.»
Gino Campanella
Ernesto Tomasini
Ernesto is an accomplished Drag Queen singer and performer. He has an extraordinary castrato voice. He is a star of the world alternative scene: he calls himself «the degenerate
version of Julie Andrews.» Ernesto is a «fluid» gay man who refuses all identification: he loves to transform himself. He lived in London for many years. Then he interrupted his brilliant career and devoted himself completely to the care of his 94-year-old mother: she suffers from dementia and is no longer autonomous. He lives with her all day long, hardly ever leaving the house. His life is becoming hell, but his love for his mother is stronger.
Ernesto Tomasini
Vivian
Vivian lives in Ballarò. Almost every day she passes Massimo and Gino’s store and often stops to talk to them. Vivian does not have an easy life; frequently she falls victim to the transphobia in the neighborhood. With Massimo she has found a shoulder to confront the thousands of doubts that still haunt her regarding her MtF transition path. She would like to become a professional actress.
Vivian Bellina
Charly
Charly, 92, is the son of Sicilian emigrants and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Moving to New York in the early 1960s, he became a longtime companion of Robert Lewis, the founder of the Actors Studio. He hung out with Hollywood’s most famous stars, including Marilyn Monroe and John Cassavetes. Back in Palermo, he lives alone in a large, half-empty house. He is the godfather of Palermo’s Gay scene, the one everyone connected with, albeit only briefly. He is living off memories, in regret of his former beauty and past glories.
Charly Abbadessa
Credits
With
Gino Campanella
Massimo Milani
Charly Abbadessa
Vivian Bellina
And with
Ernesto Tomasini
Production
soap factory GmbH
In co-production with
SRF Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, SRG SSR
and 3sat Schweiz
Written and directed by
Nicola Bellucci
Produced by
Frank Matter
Cinematography
Pierre Mennel SCS
Additional camera & location sound
Nicola Bellucci
Edited by
Piero Lassandro, Anja Bombelli
Music
Roberto Lobbe Procaccini, Valerio Vigliar
Production coordinator & communication
Loredana-Nastassja Fernández
more
Commissioning editor SRF
Urs Augstburger
National coordination SRG SSR
Sven Wälti
Commissioning editor 3sat Schweiz
Nicole Pallecchi
Sound editor
Oscar Van Hoogevest
Sound design
Andrea Padovan, Oscar Van Hoogevest, Patrick Becker
Re-recording mixer
Patrick Becker, nurTon GmbH
Color grading
Roger Somm @8horses Postproduction
Video post-production & VFX
Hannes Rüttimann, Postino Post-Production
Titles sequence animation & artwork
Martin Wülser & Patrick Oser, Former Grafik
Titles design & website
Klaus Affolter, bytes & bones
Music arrangement & production
Roberto Procaccini & Valerio Vigliar
Musicians
Roberto Izzo, Francesco Lento, Natalino Marchetti, Francesco Poeti, Roberto Procaccini, Marco Quaranta, Angelo Maria Santisi, Gianluca Vigliar, Valerio Vigliar
Financial Support
Swisslos-Fonds Basel-Stadt
Swisslos-Fonds Basel-Landschaft
Federal Office of Culture (FOC)
SUISSIMAGE Cultural Foundation
UBS Cultural Foundation
Succès Passage Antenne
Fondo per la promozione della lingua italiana nel cinema svizzero
Bios
Nicola Bellucci, Regisseur
Born in 1963 in Arezzo, Italy. 1982–86 Studies Philosophy, Literature and Film at the Università degli Studi in Florence. 1984 Receives directing degree from the Istituto di Scienze cinematografiche in Florence. 1992–96 Works as filmmaker and cameraman in Italy. 1996 Moves to Basel and works as cameraman and sound engineer. 2000 Founds Neuland-Filmproduktion in Basel. He is known for his award winning documentary «In The Garden Of Sounds» (2010), which screened at numerous festivals worldwide and for «Grozny Blues» (2015), selected for Visions du Réel, DOK Leipzig and IDFA among others. «The Stone Eater» (2018) was Bellucci’s first fiction film.
Filmography (a selection)
«Quir», documentary, 106 min., 2024; «Il mangiatore di pietre», fiction, 104 min., 2018; «Grozny Blues», documentary, 104 min., 2015; «Nel giardino dei suoni», documentary, 85 min., 2010.
FRANK MATTER, Producer
Frank Matter, born in 1964, got into filmmaking in 1992. A year later he moved to Brooklyn, NY, where he has been working for many years as a director, producer and writer. After returning to Basel in 2006, he founded the film production company soap factory GmbH. His films have won numerous awards.
Filmography as a producer
«From Punk into the Future» by Steff Bossert (in production); «Becoming vulnerable» by Gregor Brändli and Deneth Piumakshi Wedaarachchige (in production); «Quir» by Nicola Bellucci (2024); «E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea» by Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub (2024); «Segnali di vita» by Leandro Picarella (2023); «Play with the Devil – Becoming Zeal & Ardor» by Olivier Joliat and Matthias Willi (2023);«Ruäch» by Andreas Müller, Simon Guy Fässler and Marcel Bächtiger (2023); «Ann’s Pub» by Thabea Furrer (2021); «Arada» by Jonas Schaffter (2020); «Who’s afraid of Alice Miller?» (2020); «I’ll be your mirror» by Johanna Faust (2019) «Ciao Babylon» by Kurt Reinhard and Christoph Schreiber (2017); «Amalia e Giancarlo» by Kurt Reinhard and Christoph Schreiber (2017); «Grozny Blues» by Nicola Bellucci (2015); «La buena vida – The Good Life» by Jens Schanze (2015); «Thomas Hirschhorn – Gramsci Monument» by Angelo A. Lüdin (2015); «Nel giardino dei suoni» by Nicola Bellucci (2010); «Judge Not» by Robert Champi (2000).
As a director, producer, writer
«Voyage to the End of the Night» (in production); «Parallel Lives» (2021); «From One Day To The Next» (2013); «The Definition of Insanity» (2004); «The Beauty Of My Island – Shooting Klaus Lutz» (1999); «Morocco» (1997); «Hannelore» (1994).
Media
Distributor Switzerland
Cineworx
Clarastrasse 48
4005 Basel, Switzerland
+41-61-261 63 70
www.cineworx.ch
Distributor Italy
Wanted
20135 Milan, Italy
www.wantedcinema.eu
Media & Sales International
Loredana-Nastassja Fernández
Frank Matter
soap factory GmbH
Pfarrgasse 11
4047 Basel, Switzerland
film(a)soapfactory.ch
+41-61-632 00 50
www.soapfactory.ch