Simone Manetti’s new documentary, Giulio Regeni - Tutto il male del mondo [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Simone Manetti
fiche film], reconstructs the tragic case of the young Italian researcher who was kidnapped, tortured and killed in Egypt between 25 January and 3 February 2016. The film’s cinema release, in the form of event screenings taking place between 2 and 4 February via Fandango, was preceded by a premiere in Fiumicello Villa Vicentina, where Guilio grew up, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death. “Bringing Giulio back home, in some sense, and showing him to the people who’ve been fighting for the truth every day for ten years, was an extraordinary thing”, the director told us during a call. “[…] that one screening was worth all the work put into the film”.

Cineuropa: Presenting all the facts in order and letting them speak for themselves. Was that your initial aim?
Simone Manetti: The approach I had with my co-authors Emanuele Cava and Matteo Billi was to take a step back in order to create a film which doesn’t hypothesise - which is how documentaries should always be, in my opinion - so that viewers were able to make up their own minds. Our job was to lay all the cards - objective and verifiable cards - on the table. That’s why a large part of the film’s narration comes courtesy of the court proceedings. Obviously, it was also our job to make a film, to tell a story which would stir up emotions as well as explaining things. So we turned to archive material – both legal and contextual, linked to the events  – and found footage, that is footage shot by other people for other purposes which we used in our story to help viewers familiarise themselves with the streets of Cairo, the markets, the subway… All the places Giulio frequented.

The footage of the man trying to set him up, where we see Giulio alive just before he’s abducted, is unambiguous.
That was the turning point in the investigation, because it provided an explanation for what was going on. I wanted to use that footage as the starting point for the film’s aesthetics, too: a dirty, spied on, confused aesthetic which informed the visual aspect of the entire film. The footage of Guilio’s betrayal had to be the centre around which the film’s imagery would be built. We wanted to get under people's skin, and immersing viewers in that language seemed the only way to achieve this. Shooting brand-new footage to explore a time in the past would have felt jarring, so we only used footage from those particular years.

We thought we knew everything there was to know about the Regeni case, but when all the facts are laid out in front of us, they still leave us open-mouthed.
We thought we knew Guilio’s story inside-out too, because we’ve always followed it, because luckily people talked about it so much: the media coverage which his parents, Paola and Claudio Regeni, got in those years, worked. But once we started studying the cards to work out how we’d tell the story to the audience, we realised that so many important details had either been forgotten by us, or we hadn’t really been familiar with them in the first place: it’s a story that’s almost too complicated to imagine. It’s a classic case of truth being stranger than fiction, because with all its red herrings, false testimonies, obstructionism, unmoveable witnesses, and statements, there’s a little bit of everything.

For the first time, we hear Guilio’s parents talking about what happened in the first person.
We focused on them because we felt they were the only people entitled to talk about Giulio as a person. The rest of the film speaks to wider society, and we simply fell in with what’s been their fight for years now. They had the courage to stop being parents and become citizens. The fight they’re leading isn’t just for Giulio; it’s a fight, they say, for all the Giulios and Giulias in the world and for the fundamental rights of human beings to be respected.

Where does this work sit within your wider filmography?
I consider it to be a continuation of the vein I explored in the early days with Goodbye Darling, I’m Off to Fight [+lire aussi :
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bande-annonce
fiche film] and I’m In Love With Pippa Bacca [+lire aussi :
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bande-annonce
fiche film], which were documentaries of a more cinematic kind. After that, I also made more mainstream projects for platforms and TV channels. But on an emotional and personal level, this film feels a bit like a third film, because Giulio Regeni is another portrait of an exceptional figure.