28/08/2006

There was the promise of a shining future, trust in an Italy that was growing, hope for a secure job and the wonderful idea of a people that would no longer have to migrate in search of a better life in the film of the great Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, who in 1959 travelled throughout Italy, from north to south.

Italy is Not a Poor Country was commissioned by Enrico Mattei as a “promotional” film to demonstrate that the peninsula was geared towards glorious development as a result of blustering industrialisation. Today, Daniele Vicari travels “the boot” in the opposite direction, to understand what happened, 47 years later, to those promises and burgeoning industrial plants through the same places: Gela, Termini Imerese, Melfi, Rome’s ENEA, the "cinematised" Prato and Porto Marghera.

Produced on a €400,000 budget by <Gregorio Paonessa’s Vivo film S.r.l., with support from the Associazione Centenario CGIL and the collaboration of RAI Cinema, My Country (Il mio paese) will be presented at the Venice Film Festival as a special event in the Horizons section.

"I found a country of light and shadows,” said the director, “where the great promise of industrialisation and the boom created a present of powerful contradictions. In the 1960s, Italy looked toward the future with drive, yet today we find ourselves in a country closed in upon itself, even if consoles me to think that there are still people capable of reacting despite the lack of a guide, a project, from our governing politicians".

In depicting the unknown reality of many southerners who travel for 45 hours to work in Germany, mobility, Fiat factory lay-offs and scientists in Rome frustrated by working conditions and salaries that are looked down upon even by their Indian counterparts, Vicari reflects bitterly: "The differences between me and Ivens are enormous, starting with the fact that with respect to him I’m like a dwarf on the shoulders of a giant, and that I am a disillusioned man who has already seen the damage caused by the industrial promise".