Francesca Talenti’s Snake Tales

Snake Tales. A feature film by University of Texas film professor, Francesca Talenti, is dedicated to Randy. The film, which has garnered awards at numerous film festivals during 1999, draws its inspiration from both Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and The Arabian Nights. Master story-telling of lives and events in Pandale Texas weave in and out in vastly entertaining ways until they dovetail in a suirprising climax. Like Arabian Nights, the stories are nested stories like Chinese boxes and one character’s story contains another character’s story who, in turn, tells another story, and so on. Filmmaker Talenti notes that what intrigued her about this filmaking approach is that “when the storyteller suddenly pulls you back through the layers, you are left with an intricate memory, more than one path, more than one road…”