Rospi – Dietro le quinte di un’animazione in stop-motion (“Toads – Behind the scenes of stop-motion animation”) showcases the journey of the design and construction of Figli dei Rospi (“Sons of Toads”), the docu-drama co-produced by Bologna’s Seiperdue studio. The film itself tells the story two actors, one from Puglia and one a Maghreb French national, who bring their street performance about Italian immigration in France on a troubled tour from Bari to Marseille. The voices and stories of a dozen first and second generation Italian immigrants serve as the soundtrack of the film. Along with their voices, the historical events of Italian immigration to Provence in the twentieth century are told visually with a dozen puppets. These puppets are stop-motion animated in a complex puppet theatre with many characters – Antonio Gramsci, Sante Caserio, Cesare Lombroso, partisans, fascists, anarchists, miners, workers in the salt mines, legionnaires, and the old women from Piedmont who love the liquor Fernet – all of whom tell the stories of what it was like to be an immigrant more than a century ago.

This rich and evocative story and its tortuous working process involved the work of many different collaborators: the theatre that was designed and built by Donatello De Mattia; the characters made by sculptor Elena Fregni; sets, decoration, and animation created jointly by Niccolò Manzolini, Elisa Delogu, Francesca Cogni, and Lucia Principe; and editing by Nicola Artico.

SEIPERDUE started in 2005 in Bolgona as a small video editing and graphics studio. Over the years, it has created and produced short films, commercials, and music videos that experiment with many different stop-motion animation and motion graphic techniques. In 2010, it co-produced in France the film Figli dei Rospi, which was created using step one animation inside of a puppet theatre.