“Night Song of a Wandering Cowboy” by Andrea De Fusco
2023 · colour · IT · En · 12’ · Swiss premiere · In competition
“Night Song of a Wandering Cowboy” is a journey beyond the boundaries of the map of ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’, an ‘open-world’ video game with a vast surface area.
Exploiting a glitch, I pushed my avatar into territories not meant to be played, yet created by the programmers.
Here one encounters atmospheres, areas and objects charged with mystery and surreality.
Director’s biography
Andrea De Fusco is a filmmaker and visual artist born in Rome in 1990 and based in Venice. His practice spans documentary, essay film, machinima, and experimental cinema, often centered on themes of memory, landscape, and the layered relationship between image and time. He studied film in Rome, Paris, and New York.
His first feature, In Aquis Fundata (2018), is a meditative portrait of Venice and its waterbound inhabitants, combining observational documentary with lyrical narration. In 2018, he created Omaggio a L’Avventura, a photographic installation composed of Polaroids exposed on Lisca Bianca, the islet featured in Antonioni’s L’Avventura.
In Shambala (2022), filmed during two journeys through the Indian Himalayas, De Fusco reflects on the limits of visual memory and the Western imaginary of the East. His most recent work, Night Song of a Wandering Cowboy (2023), made as part of the “Nouvelle Bug” project, uses the machinima format to explore digital landscapes and avatars, questioning the cinematic potential of virtual worlds.
De Fusco’s work blends autobiography with broader visual inquiry, inviting viewers to engage critically with images and their emotional and cultural resonance.
His films have been screened at numerous international festivals, including Filmmaker Fest, Bellaria Film Festival, Lago Film Fest, San Francisco Film Festival, Diametrale, and Ethnocineca, receiving several awards.
Director Statement
Having always been fascinated by voyages of exploration, I pushed my avatar to the edge of his world and imagined sharing with him ironically some existential questions “What lies beyond the boundaries of the world we know? How can we mortals conceive of infinity or nothingness?”.
Night Song of a Wandering Cowboy is a metaphysical journey that mixes the genres of western, essay film and “machinima”.
Paradoxical as it may sound, I consider it to be a documentary, as I filmed within an existing universe, with its own rules, exploring it and questioning how it works.
