Mister Universo
Description
Each night, underneath a threadbare big top, Tairo puts an aging pride of big cats through their paces. Audiences may be dwindling, but the young lion tamer is happy, living a life that he’s dreamed of since he was a little boy. When some trailer park neighbors steal a cherished lucky charm, Tairo, uneasy without it, sets off down the back roads of Italy to find the strongman who bequeathed it to him many years ago. For this captivating docudrama, filmmaking duo Tizzi Covi and Rainer Frimmel not only mine their own cinematic past—viewers first met young Tairo in their 2010 Festival film La Pivellina—but that of Italy as well. The spirit of early Fellini can be felt in Mister Universo, alongside that of prime De Sica, as the workaday world of the circus, gently refracted though the lens of the filmmakers, reveals a sense of wonder that may fade, but will never be extinguished. –Doug Jones
Trailer
Biographies
Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel have been working together on photography, theater, and film projects since 1996. She was born in Bolzano, Italy, and he was born in Vienna. Vienna is also where they first met, when they were both studying photography. On their films, they split the directing, producing, writing, lensing, recording, and editing duties between the two of them. Their documentaries and fiction films include Das ist alles (2001); Babooska (2005); La Pivellina (Festival 2010), which was submitted as the Austrian entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 83rd Academy Awards; The Shine of the Day (2012), and Mister Universo (2016).