[quote]The directors Daniele Cipri and Franco Maresco were born in Palermo, respectively in 1962 and 1958. Their collaboration began in 1986 with short videos and experimental programs forPalermo television station TVM. In 1990, they started working on the programs Blob and Fuori Orario on Raitre. Most of their works were made in the context of the project Cinico Tv, supported by Enrico Ghezzi, establishing a critical comedy that made Sicily into an "anti Mediterranean place with leaden skies, which brings to mind the American desert, animated by the madness of winds and peopled by characters from another time. In 1992, the series Blob Cinico Tv was awarded the Aristophanes prize - which it received again in 1996 - for the best satirical television program. In the same year, they directed a video on Martin Scorsese, Martin, a Little..., in which the Italo-American director spoke of his Sicilian origins. In 1995, their first feature film on celluloid, Lo zio di Brooklyn, was released. Shown at Berlin, it was a strange and apocalyptic film which described little Mafia wars on the outskirts of Palermo. At the end of the same year their second feature film, Toto che visse due volte, was released. Cipri and Maresco's videos constitute an original cultural phenomenon in Italy, which, as critic Edoardo Bruno observed, "reveals outskirts that touch the edge of what's human, with characters straight from novels by Céline, waiting for an imminent death, in a state of total degradation and directed by an off-screen voice that evokes a Beckettian god. Cipri and Maresco express, developing their own form of visual expression, the horror of the everyday and the endless voyage." Their world, peopled with pariahs, gradually assumes a mysterious dimension, where reality is sublimated into marginality and disintegration.
[ http://www.pardo.ch/1997/filmprg/r289.html[/quote]
Finally a DVD of works by Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco will be out for RaroVideo in May.
In the meantime here's two little things to whet your appetite.
K (1996)
The most abstract of their shorts, and one of my favourite experimental movies ever.
It may be an homage to Kubrick or it may not.
K (Daniele Ciprì - Franco Maresco 1996) TVRip.avi 
Ten Minutes to the End (2002)
This is more typical of their work. There are two spoken parts. The first one, starting at ~2:55, translates more or less to:
-What the fuck of a country is it? Totò?!
-Nothing I know about it. I just know we are buried down here.
-What are they? Americans? Or Germans? [...]
-This I don't know! [...]
the second one, starting at ~06:57, is not understandable even to me, they speak a strict, beautiful dialect from Sicily.
Dieci Minuti alla Fine (Daniele Ciprì - Franco Maresco 2002) TVRip.avi 
