"Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind", John Gianvito

For three years, John Gianvito wended his way all over the United States, searching for traces of those who fought for the country's emancipation.

Epitaphs and didactic information found on the headstones, tombs and other commemorative monuments designed for visitors are thus selected and filmed. The film alternates these images with shots of nature bathed in silence: other moments necessary for evoking the souls of the dead and reviving the whispers of history. Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind reveals cinema's evocative power, as a way of restoring past and memory, in a profound and sober manner.

Born in Staten Island, John Gianvito studied at the California Art Institute before graduating from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked with documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock. He directed his first short film The Direct Approach in 1978. Curator, teacher and passionate archive-hunter, he has directed over ten films which question our relationship to memory. In 2006, he also supervised the publication of Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews. He lives and works in Boston.