I nuovi angeli

It is a report on the Italian youth structured in short episodes. The first one takes place in Sicily, and focuses the attention on young people who think it is right to arrange weddings without the subjects’ opinion. In Naples, a few lazy sons of noble families try to have fun with a trip on a yacht. The report comes to Montecatini: the protagonist is a young girl who tries to get into a factory. In Tuscany the topic is rural depopulation. Then it’s the time of the Adriatic coast and of some tourists who are looking for romance. Then it’s Milan’s turn, where the problem is the worker of a big factory and the generational break within the middle-class. The last episode is about two scions of aristocratic families who are locked in their fallout shelter and talk about their melancholic existential considerations.
Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala – English translation Francesca Sala

I used to dream of cinema with promotion purposes, as many others, especially because I had been working on television for a few years. In 1961-1962 there was a flow of dollars at the Titanus and Lombardo reinvented himself as a talent scout, helping many young people with their debut. I didn’t come from cinema, neither I had seen someone making it, I came from an experience that was completely self-invented in a rudimental field of research of TV language, of TV reports. The reason why Bini saw me was that a few of my TV report shows were noticed, such as La Sicilia del Gattopardo, a column of satirical journalism called Controfagotto etc., things in which I already used to conduct a sort of independent research, converting the interviews into episodes, dialogues, even with sketch features. I got reproached, they accused me of misrepresenting reality.
The topics assigned by television were still celebrative of the work of the Christian Democrat regime, but I used to leave the central emphatic topic and I used to deal with collateral aspects such as the farmers who were the owners of the lemon groves pissed off because they had been dispossessed from the project of making a canal. So I used to create a scene, all the things that I made later in Nuovi angeli. I brought into my first film my desire of making cinema, which up to that moment I had satisfied by using the characters that I met in my job as a TV journalist as actors. I nuovi angeli doesn’t taste like television, because even my television style was already a hybrid, it was already cinema: if cinema means to tell stories through some actors, that’s what I used to do, but not in the TV places dedicated to fiction, like television drama. (...)
The film was not a documentary, it was a chapter film, with the difference that it didn’t have a script. They allowed me to go on the location a few days earlier, to know the most typical and representative features on the level of youth habits, compared to the environment and to the social condition, and basically I chatted with the wise people of the area, who usually were the “Unità” correspondent or an educated bookseller and so on, to then try to structure a few episodes for the scene, or to compose a summary episodes with different elements of each one. Then there was the search for the actors, which followed a quick process as well. We didn’t want to create a report on youth with the arrogance of making a complete work, because in a film there is not much time for description. Instead we wanted to tell, in a one-hour-and-a-half screening, through some representative episodes connected through analogy or contrast, meetings between people and the problems of two generations, that can reflect aspects of a certain ethnic and social feature. I care to say that the film doesn’t mean to express a message nor complete an infinite subject, but it only draws some “cases”, some situations and describes unexpected reactions, which are often against the common way of thinking.

Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala – English translation Francesca Sala

Director: Ugo Gregoretti.
Soggetto e sceneggiatura: Mino Guerrini, Ugo Gregoretti, Pellizzi.
Director of photography: Tonino Delli Colli, Mario Bernardo.
Art director: Flavio Mogherini.
Editor: Nino Baragli.
Music: Piero Umiliani.
Cast: non professionisti.
Production company: Alfredo Bini per la Arco Film- Galatea-Titanus.
Italian distribution: Titanus.