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With its four variations on the theme of "absence", The Lack is a film starring six female characters: six women immersed in a silent and primitive natural environment, who undertake a journey of self-discovery in a sublime, mysterious setting. They experience abandonment, separation, courage and exertion and, through this inner voyage, try to put the broken pieces back together and fill the emptiness in their lives.

"The Lack is a film we made to meet the need to conjugate our video art with the chance to make a movie using our own film language. Making it allowed us to experiment and to go beyond video art. There are no background actors in the film, only six women alone, as no one shares their loneliness. We wanted the voice in the scenes to be radical, with a nerve-racking dynamic between a very melancholic silence and the live recording of the surrounding natural setting. We are interested in bringing visual cinema back to the center of our work, minimizing the crew and being the craftsmen of our work." [Masbedo]

Just what is that space which hosts the six women's solitudes narrated by Masbedo by means of concise, perfect micro-stories in which words and sounds blend with images to recreate the totality of life? That space is called absence. The artistic experience of moving images is the distinguishing characteristic of this narrative debut by two masters of contemporary art. And it would be pointless to tell the story and try to crack the code represented by the signs, landscapes, shouts and silences that surround the women on their journey. In a project calculated with extraordinary precision, what makes the difference is the very subjectivity of the impressions. Indeed, anyone can rewind the digital film and unwind it again according to his or her own experience, to find what for them is the hard core of its absence. If art and nature are female here, there's a reason. [Giorgio Gosetti]

The MASBEDO are a video-artist duo composed of Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni. They have exhibited their work in the world's leading museums and, in recent years, at numerous film festivals as well, such as Venice, Locarno, Rome, Istanbul, Lisbon, Athens, Miami and Reykjavik. In 2009 they participated in the 53rd Venice Biennale. Since 2002 they have been working with the French writer Michel Houellebecq with whom they have written and produced 11.22.03 and The World is not A Landscape, a work of video art with the Oscar-winning actress Juliette Binoche; it premiered in Paris at the Grand Palais.