Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to welcome filmmaker Mariangela Ciccarello for a screening of her mesmerizing film Calypso, alongside a short titled Sublunary, made in collaboration with UNDO advisor, Philip Cartelli!

In Calypso, Angela and Paola are preparing a play loosely based on The Odyssey. Angela assumes the role of Ulysses, while Paola embodies his lover, who has summoned him from the dead for a final meeting. When the play intersects with the young women’s lives, a rupture occurs. Transported, they reinvent themselves through new identities and the open space of the rehearsal stage. Calypso navigates between individual desire and the collective unconscious, reclaiming mythology from its normative foundations.

Paired with Sublunary, in which a young woman investigates an island’s geologic specificity, discovering hidden strata where history and memory meet barely submerged narratives of displacement and imaginaries of possible futures, this screening offers a meditation on transformation, myth, and identity.

Don’t miss this opportunity to experience Calypso and Sublunary on the big screen and to hear from Mariangela Ciccarello and Lucio Castro in conversation after the screening—come through!

Special thanks to Philip Cartelli for his support in helping to bring this program together.

Program

Calypso by Mariangela Ciccarello

47 minutes, 2021, HD video and Super 8mm film, Color and Black & White, Neapolitan, Italian

Sublunary by Mariangela Ciccarello & Philip Cartelli

21 minutes, 2019, HD video and Super 8mm film, Color 1.85: 1, English, Italian, and Maltese with English subtitles

Program Duration: 68 mins

Bios

Mariangela Ciccarello is a filmmaker and visual artist whose work has been featured at the Locarno Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, Ji.hlava International Documentary Festival, Harvard Art Museum, and Film at Lincoln Center, among others venues.

She holds an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, an MA from the University of Provence, and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Bologna. A former participant of the Whitney Independent Study Program, she has taught filmmaking at School of Visual Arts, Rutgers University, and the American College of Athens, Greece.

She is currently at work on her first feature-length film, entitled “Inner Sea.”

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Lucio Castro earned a BFA from the Center for Film Experimentation in Buenos Aires before moving to New York to study at The New School. His debut feature, End of the Century (Fin de siglo), premiered at New Directors/New Films at MoMA in 2019 and later screened at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, where it won the Best Film Award in the National Competition. The film has been showcased at various international festivals and distributed in 16 countries. Indiewire described it as “one of the most evocative queer films of the decade,” while Michael Koresky selected it as one of the decade’s best for Film Comment. It is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Castro’s second feature, After This Death, is based on an original script he wrote. The film stars Mia Maestro, Lee Pace, Rupert Friend, Gwendoline Christie, and Phil Ettinger, and premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2025. His third feature, Drunken Noodles, is a documentary hybrid that explores and reinterprets the life and work of queer embroidery artist Sal Salandra, and it is currently in post-production. Additionally, Castro is adapting Loitering with Intent, a work by one of his favorite authors, Muriel Spark. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor at the NYU Tisch Film Graduate Program, teaching Advanced Directing to third-year students.