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PRODUCTION Italy

In Africa, God is dead, or perhaps just "sick”

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Nineteen years after Modì, the television biography on Modigliani released in French theatres as well, Franco Brogi Taviani is back on the big screen with the documentary Forse Dio è malato (“Perhaps God is Sick”).

This journey into the tragedy of the African continent (shot with no small difficulty in Angola, Cameroon, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda) is loosely based on the book of the same name by Walter Veltroni, former mayor of Rome and a presidential candidate for the upcoming elections.

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For those who think they’ve read (and seen) it all, the film offers a look at a multiform reality that in part has never been seen before. If the AIDS epidemic, like lives of hardship in open air garbage dumps, are scourges that anger but no longer shock, the same cannot be said of the growing number of children in Angola accused of witchcraft, and thus abandoned or killed by their own families.

Foregoing off-camera narration and explicatory captions, the director says he wanted to give the film “a dramaturgical and poetic structure, which was also achieved thanks to the music by Giuliano Taviani and Carmelo Travia, written by Senegal’s Badara Seck and performed by a very young South African singer, Siya Makuzeni”.

Forse Dio è malato was produced by Ager 3, run by Grazia Volpi, the project’s true engine. “It was she who convinced me. Her passion helped me overcome my fears,” says Taviani, who cites one passage above all from Veltroni’s book: “In Africa, the goal is not to be happy, but to survive. But it is a war. Which Africa could lose forever”.

Made for €700,000 the documentary received support from the Ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs, as well as numerous NGOs.

It will be distributed on six screens in Italy on February 29 by Istituto Luce.

(Translated from Italian)

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