RAW is a sensitive exploration of a bloody environment where Taiwanese butchers work with skill and meticulous precision. Set on Formosa Island in Taizhong city, the film follows Jack The Black Knife and his team as they cut 300 pigs every night, revealing a performative mastery that borders on ritual. The butchers’ work is simultaneously cruel and authentic, showing a primitive and ancestral form of artistic expression where matter itself becomes a statement of being, devoid of rhetoric.
LANGUAGE : Chinese – Min Nan COUNTRY : Taiwan YEAR : 2024 DURATION : 13m DIRECTOR : Federico Trasparente Montaresi
Director Statement : With RAW, I aimed to capture an unfiltered encounter with labor, skill, and instinct. The Taiwanese butchers’ nightly practice is violent, precise, and ritualistic, yet through their work emerges a kind of unconscious artistry. I wanted to explore how intense, repetitive actions can transform matter into expression, and how the body, tools, and environment together create an experience that is both brutal and authentic. RAW is not about narrative or metaphor, but about presenting a direct, sensory, and ritualized engagement with the act of creation itself, where cruelty and precision meet in a strangely poetic form.
Bio : Federico Trasparente Montaresi is an Italian filmmaker and researcher exploring extreme and immersive audiovisual experiences. His works focus on ritual, corporeality, and performative precision, often highlighting intense human practices and environments. He has presented projects internationally, examining the boundary between instinctive action and artistic expression. Montaresi’s practice spans video, installation, and experimental cinema, with a focus on confronting viewers with raw and direct sensory experiences.
Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved.
Pebbles Underground is an independent project not funded by any government or corporation, and we intend to keep it that way. Main source of funding is personal donations from humans organizing the project, who are artists themselves, and the main drive of the project is formed by the energy and involvement of the organizers, and the public.
