Lucca Animation

A complete artist (not only film maker, but also musician and graphic novels author) Rosto is the creator of a visionary and fascinating universe, with a number of possible interpretations. His films, walking the fine line between surrealism and expressionism, are a mixture of the most different techniques (live action shooting, traditional animation, 3D computer animation, cut out animation, stop motion), with a stunning visual outcome.

The screening of all his movies in one single event is a unique occasion to appreciate both the oneiric logic driving the individual storytelling and, in the same time, the underlying bond amongst all of them, originating a greater picture. Rosto's world, unsatisfied with being simply surreal, becomes, through its complex layering, mythical, with recurring characters rising to an archetypical status. Nothing else but myth (or, even better, myth in the myth, as all the film is a tale on his turn) is the "christological" parable of Anglobilly Feverson, trying in any way to escape his oppressive world through the legendary "hole in the sky".

Rosto's world draws origin from the lyrics of The Wreckers, his rock band as well as soundtrack of all his films, and expands into the Mind My Gap cycle, whose core is an audiovisual graphic novel published on the artist website that clearly presents itself as an animated storyboard. Mind My Gap universe is centered on Diddybob and Buddybob, two television anchormen that escape their closed world to venture into the outside, whose deeds represent the main thread of the narration. Virgil is outstanding in the gallery of surreal characters they meet in their journey: frightening god/demon of the "outside" world, he sports Rosto's very face. And it's absolutely not by chance that in Jona/Tomberry Virgil is portrayed as a demiurge-director, filming everything with his camera-whale, continuously reminding that everything is "just a projection/screening" and that his work is about "evil, so convincing, delusions".

In order to dive in Rosto's films, knowing all the details of his dreamworld is not mandatory, but the continuous cross-references and, more, the underlying narrative of Mind My Gap saga, to whom also the films do belong, exalt the mirror game that is the actual main theme of the entire operation. All Rosto's dream have the contrasts as a common base: in and out, high and low, reality and illusion. The "double" topic (often changing to "multiple") is the core of all his films and the mirror, highest example of duplicity, is the undisputed protagonist of Jona/Tomberry.
Jona (or Tomberry?) himself is another symbol of the double, with his two names and two natures, half child and half fish, being neither one nor the other. Monstrous to Diddybob, who shoots him incited by Virgil, and saviour to the Langemanne, mysterious tree-looking beings that welcome him as a Messiah and are, on their turn, the mirroring double of Virgil, hence, once more a projection of their author.