17/10/2006

It came about almost as a joke at the height of the Berlusconi era, as a series of sketches for the television programme Il caso Scafroglia (2002), to become a huge success. Hundreds of emails followed, from fans who wanted to know how the Fascists’ saga ended, which propelled the writers/actors of the sci-fi, Fascist propaganda-style satire Fascisti su Marte [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (lit. “Fascists on Mars”) to the silver screen and the RomeFilmFest where the film is screening in the Extra section.

On release in Italy on October 27, on 50 screens, the film depicts the tragicomic trials and tribulations of five “good ol’” Fascists (Corrado Guzzanti, Marco Marzocca, Lillo Petrolo, Andrea Blarzino and Andrea Purgatori) through several fictitious newsreel clips steeped in the language typical to Fascist propaganda (and with obvious references to “Berlusconian” language).

The film is set in 1939, when the Duce’s expansionist sights send our heroes out to conquer the Red Planet. Lacking food and water, they manage to survive on Mussolini-esque ideology, inventing imaginary foes. However, a series of misadventures risk compromising their mission until they are saved by a group of aliens.

Directed by Igor Skofic and produced by Domenico Procacci’s Fandango, Fascisti su Marte is based, above all, on post-production special effects, after a shoot that took place three years ago in an apartment on the outskirts of Rome.

"I studied a lot of archive material from that period, in order to reinvent a ‘macaronic, Roman’ language, with Fascist tendencies", said Guzzanti, also one of the writers of the successful satire. "At first we shot it as if it were a silent film,” he added, “but then, upon realising that a fascist-style voiceover for 90 minutes could have been overly weighty, we interspersed it with images with musical inserts and dialogue. Gradually, from a silent, captioned newsreel it became a spoken film in colour".

(Translated from Italian)