It is the hoarse voice of the historian Alessandro Stella that marks the rhythm of Ciompi, the new film by Agnès Perrais presented at the Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro, which tells the story of the popular struggles that shook Florence in August 1378. Perrais’ film was born following a feminist laboratory on the use of Super8 film, which the French director uses alongside 16mm film, to create a feature that tells one of the greatest urban revolts of the Middle Ages and links it to the struggles of today.

A work in which the dialectic between present and past has the demanding task of clearly showing the same need for social and economic emancipation of the textile workers of Florence, both those of yesterday and today. This bridge across time is not the only thread running through Agnès Perrais’ grainy film. Also intersecting with the Ciompi revolt is the life of Alessandro Stella, who escaped from Italy in the 1970s and recounts his story as a political refugee in France and the story of the small population of Florence with the same pathos. Inserted in the oral history of the Ciompis, which continues chronologically, are images of a spectral, medieval Florence, intercut with images of protests by the textile workers who inhabit the same places of struggle.

Perrais points out the contradictions within the industrial model by placing in the same filmic space the industrial area of ​​Prato, where immigrant workers are exploited to produce clothes for a few euros (as if history had not moved in almost seven hundred years); and the center of glamorous Florence that sells those clothes, together with an unsustainable luxury model called Made In Italy.

Ciompi is a political and pictorial film precisely because of its ability to restore the melancholy of a defeated and popular Florence that ranges from Masaccio's frescoes to the cinema of Straub-Huillet, passing through the Macchiaioli painters of the 19th century.  Perrais draws a different, opposite and peripheral geography, one of enchanting beauty, in which it is the common people who are the engine of history. It is the losers who are the protagonists and who are at the center of an official story that wants to put them aside, hide them. This is rendered in a cinematic way by the centrality in the scene of the figures of the workers on strike, who loudly reclaim their desire not to be crushed by the greed of the bosses and their right to a dignified life. In this sense, the aesthetic research of the film moves with a rigorous construction of images, due not only to the fact that the film was shot on film but also to its concern about how we should rethink history and the narrative of the present. The suspended moments in Agnès Perrais' shots stand in opposition to the distant speed with which the mass media show the weakest, demonstrating that it is still possible to make cinema in a political way, shifting one's gaze and re-appropriating time. The time. Isn't that what the workers are asking for with the reduction of working hours?

Ciompi è co-prodotto da L’image d’après e La surface de dernière diffusion con il sostegno di Tënk e di Mediapart.