Book Club

Venice. September 1974. English young art student Nicholas meets the legendary costume and set designer Danilo Donati and becomes his personal assistant (as well as his lover). Together they travel first to Rome, where they recreate Venice in the Cinecittà studios for Fellini’s “Casanova”, and then to the set of “Salò”, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism. Pasolini will be brutally murdered short after under mysterious circumstances at a beach in Ostia in November 1975, right before the movie’s release.

Through the “innocent” eyes of a fictional character Olivia Laing tells a queer love story and a noir-ish thriller set between artifice and truth, the dream factory of cinema and the tense political reality of Italy’s Years of Lead.

Marco Astolfi is a literary translator, writer and fairy from Italy. He lives in Berlin, is a co-organizer of the Village Heart Circle for GBTQ men and runs the Book Club evening every two months. He is a regular at Creative Writing and can occasionally be found modeling for Life Drawing classes. He attended the One Year Training in 2018 and led the Cock O’Clock workshops at Easter Stretch Festival 2019 and Private Talk at Stretch Imagina 2020.

About the Village Book Club
Book lovers and bookworms have been meeting on a bimonthly basis to discuss works of fiction and non-fiction (novels, biographies, and essays) focused on or related to GBTQ themes and personalities.
Anticipating insightful discussions, we choose the next book two months in advance.
While the evening discussions are conducted in English, participants are welcome to read the selected books in their preferred language.

** This event is part of the we are village program ‘Belonging versus Lonelines‘, with the support of LADS.
Learn more about the program here.