DARKNESS MATTERS
Audio-Visual Installation / Fulldome documentary / speculative VR experience
by Costanza Julia Bani
World Sales Reef Distribution GmbH
Distribution Fellonica Film AB
Darkness Matters is a sensory immersive and meditative audio-visual experience. The project exists in three variations, one for domes, one for VR and one as a flatscreen version, that can be shown as single channel or multiscreen installation.
It takes the audience from cultural to natural landscapes. It starts in the olive groves in Calci, Tuscany, by night, slowly illuminated by fireflies and proceeds with an ideal movement from one altitudinal zonation to another. It ascends to the montane zone, showing forests and some of its crepuscular or nocturnal inhabitants, the hedge-hog, an owl, the wolf, and ibexes and goes up to the alpine zone, discovering meadows beneath mountains profiles, above which the Milky way makes its arc and makes us wonder.
The film wants to contribute to raise awareness around the effects of light pollution and debunk the culturally induced fear of darkness.
The dome version will contain elements of multi-species storytelling, as we will include the animal's perspective, thanks to a novel camera, making it possible to capture their vision. For the VR version the narrative has been fed with data about light pollution, which will make it possible for the user to choose to observe a more or less polluted nocturnal environment, depending on how much light pollution we will accept. The implementation of this interactive tool was possible thanks to the inkind investment of InfraVIS and VIC Studio at KTH.
Dedicated to my son Elias Theodor Bani Lindström and my family
Credits:
Filmmaker and impact producer Costanza Julia Bani
Producers Lars G Lindström and Costanza Julia Bani
Associate Producer Roberto Bresin / NAVET
Flatscreen version crew:
Editor: Luca Cappelli
Directors of photography by altitude,
Foothills and montane zone: Francesco Andreotti
Olive groves with fireflies: Radim Schreiber
Alpine zone and Milky Way: Alex D'Emilia
Sound recording and design: Nicola Gualandris and Naomi Galbiati
VFX Nils Friden / Velourfilm
Fulldome / VR version crew:
DOP and head of postproduction Oliver Akermo
Sound recording and design Sebastian Dahlgren
VFX Oliver Akermo
With the support of
The Swedish Film Institute
Fellonica Film
Stockholm University of the Arts research funds
Small Visionary Projects
TWG NAVET (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
Swedish Art Grants Committee
Comune di Calci
Fondazione Compagnia San Paolo
C.M. Lerici Foundation
Magnus Bergsvalls Foundation
Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Stoccolma (Italian Cultural Institute Stockholm)
Official and warm and perpetual thanks to Irene Borgna, Federico Pellegrino, Fabio Falchi, and Roberto Morbidelli (INAF), who made me discover complete new aspects of darkness.
Gratitude to Dan E. Nilsson and Daniel Hanley for their work on animal vision and their dedication to capturing it, developing technologies, we could implement in our footage creatively
Flatscreen version was shown as WIP at:
CROSSCUTS Environmental Humanities Festival November 2024
Scenkonst Museet (Museum of Performing Arts) December 2024
Reactor Hall (Stockholm Design Week) February 2025
m:brane forum Malmö March 2025
WIRE - Artistic Research Exhibition in Sofia Bulgaria, June 2025
HAGARFLUG - Conference Reykjavik Iceland, September 2025
Pinerolo Film Festival October 2025 (PIFF https://pinerolofilmfestival.it/)
For the fulldome version shows, please follow the NEWS tab of this website
MEASURING A NATION / UNSTABLE GROUNDS
Feature documentary and XR project
by Costanza Julia Bani and Swiss co-director TBA
Against the backdrop of blatant land grabbing, contingent sovereignty, the border becomes something that has been framed both as a living frontier or as open wounds, that are never fully sutured, while the glaciers and watersheds, the geological stratifications marking these lines become more and more unstable. Beside the evident issue of water resources and supplies in the future and whom they will belong to, this project is guided by the question:
Where does a country begin and where does it end?
There was a time in fact when nobody owned land, then it all changed and frontiers, migration routes have been redrawn and reshuffled infinite times, creating a world map with potential as infinite "lines". There was a time also when two tectonic plates met and created the Alpine Arc in millions of years and there was a time yet when glaciers formed in millennia and finally a time when the nation state was born with the contemporary application of border rules. Timespans involving either geology and glaciology or timespans involving geopolitics.
Measuring a Nation / Unstable Grounds is a film and immersive experience about moving glaciers, watersheds, landslides and changing borders. It is about physical markers, fragile terrains, vanishing ice-cores and the consequences and meaning of their shifts. It is a creative documentary (extended into VR and possibly fulldome) about natural borders, apparently unquestionable and self-evident, and the creation of political borders: told through two very special lodges. One by the Plateau Rosa with its Theodul Glacier (Rifugio Guide del Cervino) and one by the route between Hochfeiler and its Schlegeiskees, the Hochferner and Griesferner (Landshuter Europahütte).
Measuring a Nation / Unstable Grounds is an immersive experience where nature redraws the map. The embodied and sensory experience "pushes" both humans and other-than-humans from one side to the other, lets the user be disoriented in the virtual space and gives guidance again with the solution adopted by bilateral agreements. Historian Eric Hobsbawm writes about nations as a political artefact, convened upon by humans and not a natural state of things.
Democracy roots in the idea of nation states able to self determination. Fascism roots in the idea of homeland and national identity. Frontiers root in the idea of separation, possession of land and in the principle of determining who can live there or pass through it, crossing a border.
Juxtaposing millennia of nature forming its own paths and ways, its durable eco-systems, its slow evolution to possibly quickly vanishing political systems, we want to explore the very idea of belonging and on a larger scale. We want to use the cinematic device as a measuring instrument, becoming part of the investigation itself.
IT'S ALWAYS THE SUN
Feature Documentary In Development
by Costanza Julia Bani and Nikola Lorenzin
It’s always the sun is a personal portrait of the sun, our "unruly" star, its power and vulnerability, my, our and human’s relation to it, our need for it to survive and romanticize, its fundamental part in our system and place in the universe. Within a lyrical and philosophical framework scientists will tell us about the relevance of shuttles sent out into space to study the sun; about solar-geoengineering experiments currently done and foreseen for the future to bounce sun rays back in the stratosphere to cool down the planer's temperatures; and the bet on nuclear fusion and the construction of power plants of the future to create clean energy, imitating the sun. Fragile creatures, including us as human-beings, experience life and death, joy and despair in the face of its power, as well as the ungraspable fact that also the sun will die once its last cycle of helium and hydrogen will have taken place, and so the solar system we are part of
VAULTS / The Custodians Trilogy
Multimedia Project In Development
by Costanza Julia Bani
The ice core sanctuary opened by the Ice Memory Foundation, the Seed Vault on the Svalbard and the Onkalo waste repository at the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant on the island of Olkiluoto are three places where today scientists want to try to preserve what might survive us. Through these three different enterprises we want to build a multimedia project that takes us into these vaults to understand what we are going to miss (or not) in a speculative future and why the custodians, who created them, did what they did
SKYSCRAPERS
Multimedia Project In Development
by Costanza Julia Bani
There where according to Dante paradise on Earth expands on a rocky coastline (the famous Costiera Amalfitana below Naples in Southern Italy) in the 60ies a concession was given to build the first eco-monster, an enormous hotel complex devastating the landscape, the Hotel Fuenti. It never came to completion and the family, that was condemned to tear it down in the 90ies, is the same that was given the concession to build a Mediterranean Garden, an ecologically sustainable park completed recently.
Our multimedia projects wants to tell the story of this place through its planning as an architectural project, the court case and its rebirth. The title comes from a poet Literature Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale wrote about the building.
Pare che prima o poi
anzi prima che poi
sugli Aliscampi che splendono
tra Amalfi e Vietri si vedranno enormi
grattacieli e già sorge dalla cintola insù
l’intellighenzia, con suoi alti piati.
Ma saranno sprecati; grattare il cielo
è ciò che resta a chi non creda più
che un cielo esista.
Eugenio Montale, March, 8th, 1975
OCEAN BOTTOM PROJECT / ALL WHAT FLICKERS AND GLOWS
Full Dome Project In Development
by Costanza Julia Bani
Full dome theatre project. In the mysterious abyss of the ocean, bioluminescent creatures cast an enchanting glow, painting the depths with an otherworldly radiance. This aquatic light show finds its terrestrial counterpart in the gentle flicker of fireflies, whose ethereal dance mirrors the galactic choreography of the Milky Way. From the ocean's depths to the heavens above, a symphony of bioluminescence and celestial brilliance unfolds, connecting the microcosm of abyssal fishes, octopuses, jellyfishes and anemones to land-dwelling fireflies to the macrocosm of the galaxy in a harmonious display of natural wonders
THE SPECTACLE
short film in distribution / feature film in development
by Yasmin van Dorp and The Small Worlds Collective
The Spectacle is a short documentary that sheds light on the evolving nature of travel behavior in today’s digital age. Filmed in various locations across South Norway, Lapland, and Türkiye, the film unravels the transformation of serene landscapes into bustling tourist attractions.
Winner Full Frame President’s Award 2025 Full Frame President’s Award at the 27th Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham, North Carolina. Presented by Duke University, the President’s Award honors the Best Student Film, recognizing outstanding work by up-and-coming filmmakers.
The film has since had a long festival career, still ongoing with an acquisition of The New Yorker documentary, where it was streamed in March 2026.
