Andrea Deaglio: Il futuro del mondo passa da qui/3
On this site we have been writing about this film a couple of times. It came out of the European training programme called DocuRegio, where I met it, and I was surprised that the festivals in Leipzig and Amsterdam did not pick the film. French Cinema du Réel did and Saturday night the film got its first recognition, the Joris Ivens Prize for Best First film. Very deserved. Here is a repeat of the review that I wrote in August last year:
… the subtitle being ”city veins”. I wrote about it in June and promised to come back with a review when the film was finished. Which is now.
Angelo, Roky, Frida, Reno, Darius, Gerardo, Jasmina… names of people, who have that in common that they are characters in a film that as location has the outskirts of Torino, where they all live outside normal urban society trying to survive. For a limited time as the area will be turned into a golf and similar kind of recreation centre, as well as it will be object to making transport out of the city easier through new roads etc.
From this description you might expect a political correct activist film like many others – it is not. On the contrary, the focus is the human. Deaglio and his cameramen follow the individuals in their daily activities: Roky gets up, goes to the lake to get washed, goes to get some drinking water… Frida goes to the drug meeting point… Reno cooks and finishes his van Gogh painting. Washing of hair. Repairing a bicycle. Doing nothing.
The images are stunning. Making the area look beautiful. They come as tableaux, chaptering the characters stories which in words are told by themselves through audio on black images. As I don’t understand Italian, for me the words appear subtitled on black with no ”disturbing” images. Which makes the effect very strong – precise small stories of situations they have experienced, facts accompnied by emotions. The director has no intention to sentimentalise or romanticize – I sense an honest, truthful and distant view, and this is why you stay linked to the screen where you also get many interesting and surprising camera angles. In other words – welcome to a non-mainstream documentary film talent.
