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Justin Randolph Thompson

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Parascintille is a film and sound meditation on the life and legacy of Afro-Florentine resistance fighter Alessandro Sinigaglia. Examining the site of Sinigaglia’s upbringing, this work is a poetic film tribute to Black Italian resistance across generations and the transnational underpinnings of these under-narrated historical threads of time. Filmed at the Villa Smith, his place of birth, the work features Gildelen Ati-Biyo and textual meditations written by the resistance fighter himself and by city council members Antonella Bundu and Dmitrij Palagi. The work is an intimation of the cultural bridge represented by Sinigaglia’s mother Cynthia White, an African American women brought to Italy by a family from Missouri. Her nurturing of a revolutionary is the backdrop for this critical repositioning of power and privilege. The sound score by Sadi and Thompson developed around the idea of caged anxiety and socio-spiritual release.