Stefano Savona • Director of The Walls of Bergamo
"The film is a collective portrait of a city which is finding its feet again after being destroyed by that crisis"
- BERLINALE 2023: We chatted with the director about his documentary on the Covid crisis in the city of Bergamo in spring 2020 and how the locals later elaborated on the situation
What should have been an instant documentary has become a reflection, after the Covid crisis, on our relationship with time, life and death. We met with Stefano Savona, the director behind the documentary The Walls of Bergamo [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Stefano Savona
film profile], which was presented in the Berlinale’s Encounters section, to discuss his approach to filming one of the cities most badly affected by the tragedy of the pandemic.
Cineuropa: You live in France. When the first tragic images of the pandemic were broadcast in March 2020, you decided to leave…
Stefano Savona: I listened to all of my friends who were living in that area and I realised how devastating the situation was. I immediately called some former students of mine from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Palermo and I suggested we do what I’d done in other emergency situations. I told them that if we could make our way there, maybe we’d be able to tell their story. Within the space of a few days, some producers from ILBE called and I spoke to them about the project.
This is a really unusual production for Iervolino and Bacardi’s ILBE, which usually devotes itself to fiction films with a Hollywood feel.
Yes, I don’t think they’d ever seen one of my films; they knew I’d made the documentary Samouni Road [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Stefano Savona
film profile], which won an award in Cannes in 2018. I said that we’d take the time needed to shoot and I sought assurances for the type of film I wanted to make. It’s not like working with a producer that you know well, like my friend Marco Alessi, who I made Samouni and Tahrir Liberation Square [+see also:
trailer
film profile] with. ILBE weren’t prepared for three years of work, and we struggled to understand one another. But bit by bit, we found a way to finish the film. We always enjoyed a maximum amount of freedom. I like to go to different places and wait a while to understand what I need to shoot. But my films have always been self-produced, and I could afford to do this.
So you returned after the crisis too?
We realised that the things we were filming wouldn’t have had meaning if we hadn’t followed our protagonists out of the other side of that nightmare. We stayed in Bergamo for four consecutive months and then we returned continually over the course of a year and a half.
How did you go about filming the documentary?
We tried to establish more confidential relationships with health professionals and volunteers, and, slowly, we found openings without ever forcing the issue. The city was mobbed by the media, because news outlets wanted images each and every day. We tried to take a step back and, over time, this helped us to get closer to the action.
The shot of the man writing home while in hospital on a ventilator is symbolic, as if he were on some kind of front, fighting his own battle.
He writes something that no-one will ever be able to read. That shot, for me, is really important. When we were shooting that sequence, I suddenly understood the significance of what we were doing. Those cruel pictures conveying the absurdity of what was happening really summed up the surrealness and tragedy of the situation.
What gave you the idea of incorporating old footage?
The idea came out of a need I felt to reconstruct the stories of these people who’d experienced the reality of a medically induced coma in order to be intubated, and who I spoke to post-event. They talked about how, at the time, they could still feel their own body, pick up on external stimuli, but they weren’t able to communicate. They felt like they were stuck in bed. I used those images from the past to try to visualise fragments of memories which were suspended at that time of suffering, both positive and negative memories. Over the course of the film, this web of memories turns into conscious memories. We used footage from Cinescatti, amateur archive film from Bergamo.
The city also plays a role in the documentary.
The city is the film’s protagonist. To begin with, these people undergoing treatment are cut off from the world of relationships, they only have fragmented memories. Their recovery is also the recovery of the city, of a social body which is finally getting back to understanding the meaning of being together. That’s what the film is, a collective portrait of a city which is finding its feet again after being destroyed by the crisis. And as the people find their feet, they also rediscover what it means to be citizens.
You’ve described it as a “memorial film”.
The film doesn’t explore the political issues behind healthcare crises or our relationship with the planet. It talks about what Covid was like in a certain place, and how to learn lessons when it comes to our relationship with time, life, death, different generations… They’ve all come to terms with this, at the same time and in the same place, independently of Covid. And they’ve had the opportunity to think about how unprepared we are when it comes to thinking about the limits of our lives.
(Translated from Italian)