29/04/2005

Produced by Esperia Film, the screenplay for El silenzio dell’allodola gained the support of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers (Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri) and was able to be completed thanks to the National Cultural Fund (Inrestese Culturale Nazionale). David Ballerini had already directed some short films and an arts documentary. He also wrote about Pasolini and still does today, and in many respects his film bears the mark. He explained before the projection of his film that when he came across the story of Bobby Sands, it struck him that this happened in our time, here in Europe. He talked also of the first pictures of Iraqi prisoners which astonished him and his team, so close were they to images from his film. El silenzio dell’allodola (The Silence of Skylark), is the history of Bobby Sands, a young Irish poet, who died in 1981 at the age of 27, following a hunger strike that lasted 66 days, to protest against the conditions of political prisoners in the United Kingdom.

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El silenzio dell’allodola creates a myth, an incarnation of moral resistance against all forms of oppression. With very bare sets, almost theatrical, made up of corridors, warehouses and cells, which evoke both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the film is deliberately timeless. And the actor Ivan Franek, almost naked, with his beard and black eyes resembles Enrique Irazoquim, Christ in The Gospel According to Matthew. But this first feature doesn’t escape the problem that we see in other first films, of not being understood. With its sharply contrasting black and white, its play with darkness and light, its Christian symbols, the film often attempts to outdo itself. However, carried by a spiralling narrative, a magnificent actor, thanks to his soft lyrical delivery, it manages to portray the innocence, beauty and righteousness of the principal character.

(Translated from French)