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VENICE 2009 Competition / Italy

Placido and The Big Dream of ‘68

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After years working in TV drama, Pietro Valsecchi and Camilla Nesbitt return to cinema with Michele Placido, having previously produced his debut film Pummarò and the successive Ordinary Hero. The highly anticipated The Big Dream [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, which follows the hit Crime Novel [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Michele Placido
film profile
]
(2005), is the first fruit of the 2007 agreement that led to a merger between Valsecchi and Nesbitt’s Taodue and Medusa (who are releasing it on Friday on 450 screens).

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The €10m film, co-produced by France’s Babe Film, is the second major Italian title in Competition at Venice, after Tornatore’s Baarìa [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
. It is inspired by the director’s memories of his time as a policeman, when he emigrated from the south as an aspiring theatre actor.

The setting is 1968 and young, rather naive Puglia-born Nicola (played by Riccardo Scamarcio) gets swept up in the wind of change blowing through Rome at the time. Sent by his superiors to infiltrate the occupied university, Nicola falls in love with a Catholic girl, Laura (Jasmine Trinca), who is involved in the student movement. He ends up abandoning his uniform to study drama.

Laura is in love with a student-worker and leader of the movement, Libero (Luca Argentero), but in the end Nicola’s simplicity, passion and energy will win her heart. Meanwhile, around them, a momentous revolution, full of pacifism and emancipation, is waning. The Piazza Fontana bombing is just around the corner, the years of terrorism are fast approaching.

Coupled with Arnaldo Catinari’s dazzling cinematography, with great skill, Placido has directed a film that cannot be defined as about 1968 and doesn’t claim to paint a portrait of that era, but gives youngsters an idea of the origins of that freedom we take for granted today, as its star Scamarcio wisely commented during the press conference.

"It’s a diary of my life", Placido explained, "a popular and political novel and only at the end do we see the shadow of 1970s violence. In ’68, we were creative, we danced and played. It was a party. It was the reaction of the police that triggered the violence."

With reference to Pier Paolo Pasolini, who, after the clashes at Valle Giulia in Rome in March 1968, sided with the policemen because they were "sons of the poor against sons of bourgeois families", Placido said that his words were prophetic: "So many have abandoned the ideals of those years. I continue my own '68, giving my work a political orientation. But I don’t agree with Pasolini, those bourgeois kids whom I beat with my policeman’s truncheon went on to teach me a lot".

In The Big Dream, protagonist Nicola goes to the cinema to see films by Bergman, Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket and French New Wave films. "Years ago", said Placido, "we were writing this film [co-written by Doriana Leondeff and Angelo Pasquini, ndr] when we received the news that Bernardo Bertolucci was shooting The Dreamers. We stopped and started working on it again two years ago".

A Spanish journalist asked him why he had made a film, whose ideals oppose the current government, with financing from the prime minister’s family company. "I’ve also been attacked for making a film with RAI. Who am I supposed to make films with then? Anyhow, I don’t know or vote for Berlusconi".

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(Translated from Italian)

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