14/02/2008

Just a few weeks after the release of Signorinaeffe [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Wilma Labate’s film on the Fiat strikes, two documentaries are also bringing back into the centre of the collective cinematic imagination (and political debate) the more or less recently history of the workers movement.

The first, In fabbrica (“In the Factory”) by Francesca Comencini, is a RAI production (made by Offside) that spans half a century of workers’ faces, voices and gestures, preserved in the material of Rai Teche, the Audiovisual Archives of the Democratic and Workers Movement and the Archivio Nazionale del Cinema d’Impresa of Ivrea.

Through the faces and dialects of a changing Italy (from post-WWI, to the economic boom to the reflux of the 1980s), In fabbrica – which after its premiere at the Turin Film Festival will be broadcast today after prime time, by RAI Tre – mixes the intimate with the collective, the private and the public, the victories and defeats, and daily struggles with the story of 40 years of union battles.

A television broadcast, however, is a privilege, as the increasingly more set-apart Daniele Segre knows all too well. He recently presented his Morire di lavoro (“Dying of Work”) in Parliament, obtaining the support of President of the Camera Fausto Bertinotti and many members of the political and union world.

This film also offers a stream of faces and accents (at times foreign), but to speak about today, about how every day someone leaves their house to earn a living – and dies. In the north and south, the figures are akin to civil war (235 victims in construction alone): an emergency that unites all of Italy, like the national anthem that resounds at the beginning and end of the documentary.

Nevertheless, the film (produced by Segre’s company I Cammelli, with support from the CGIL Construction Workers Union and the Piemonte Doc Film Fund) has not distributor yet, nor a television broadcaster. And thus risks of dying from indifference, besides just work.

(Translated from Italian)