Pelle viva

Andrea and Rosaria meet on a train full of commuters. He is a workman responsible of a furnace, who lives in the South of Lombardy, she is a girl from Apulia, with a love child in a charity institute. Love blooms between them. Despite difficulties and misunderstandings they decide to get married. Andrea, because of his spirit of independence, ends up losing his job and being forced to accept a less qualified job. So he decides to move to Milan and get the management of a gatehouse with Rosaria. But he loses the job because of a compatriot recommended by the parish priest.
During a protest Andrea reacts abruptly against an agent. He is taken to trial and ends up in prison for a whole month. When he gets out, he finds Rosaria with their first child. He has to start all over again, working as a handyman in a construction site.
Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala - English translation Francesca Sala

Giuseppe Fina
Before Pelle viva I made a few documentaries which went really well and were also awarded. The friend who produced them believed in me and gave me the money. The film cost 67 million and was shot during 8 weeks. Unfortunately it got a bad distribution. But it didn’t take long to pay back all the expenses. The weakness of independent films is that they can’t benefit of any form of advertising, it would be necessary to spend more money on it than on the creation of the film, but that’s not possible. The viewer doesn’t usually know the director, the actors, the story, the title. So he doesn’t want to watch the film. The advertising of Pelle viva was focused on the “sexy” appearance of Elsa Martinelli. The viewer who went to the cinema for this reason was disappointed and those who could have been interested didn’t go because they didn’t know anything about it.

Carlo Castellaneta
Fina read my novel “Una lunga rabbia” and wanted to make a film out of it. We talked and we decided to draft a first script. But later Fina changed his mind, and he was right, because that novel was not suitable; it would have become a sui generis film, too polished and based on not so popular topics. He said he had a worker story in mind, a story on commuters. We structured it together only on that one topic. (...)
Fina came from the news, he had been a great newspaper journalist and so it was natural for us to lead a sort of personal report. We went to the Falk factory, we spoke to the workers. We thought we could shoot the film in a modern steelworks, different from those of the 19th century, like the one that is actually in the film. (...)
Lambrate, Bovisa, Porta Vittoria, we spoke to the railwaymen, with the passengers. Lambrate at 6 pm is amazing, so we boarded with that flow of workers, travelling with them. What was the result of this experience? A negative result, compared to the inspiration; first of all because fantasy is always greater than reality and second because we should have done so many more journeys like that to get the typical situations of the commuters’ conditions. Anyway we took some sparks for an external inspiration: some features of these people on the train, their faces, their clothes. It was especially a theatrical tailoring kind of job. We arrived to Crema and we left the morning after, waking up at 4 am to catch the train with them at 5 am. That dawn, that train coming from far away, the first opening bar: I think we put this into the film, I think that Fina could show this misery. Even if intuition would have been enough: we want there for the sake of it, to check and we found confirmation. Maybe there is an excess of spoof, but it is because of another kind of reasoning: we thought that the film was too heavy, sad and serious for the audience, that it could be boring and we wanted to respect some needs not on the business level but on the show one.
Fina aimed (and succeeded) at showing a farming universe with all its implications, with the patriarchal family and the children that leave the land to work in factories, a story that deserves a whole new movie. There are also the conformists of the village, the usual character of the sister and the old prejudice of the countryside against the city: we discussed about all these things. (...)
Fina, however, put into the film a certain attitude, not really ironic, but more of political unconventionality, and I had never thought about that because I am more related to a specific ideology. For example, what a worker says to the other passengers: “Se te manget ti, a mesdì, i discurs de Togliatti?” ( “What do you eat for lunch, Togliatti’s speeches?” but in the dialect of Milan). Such a sentence can be suitable for those people.

Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala - English translation Francesca Sala

Director: Giuseppe Fina.
Soggetto e sceneggiatura: Carlo Castellaneta, Giuseppe Fina.
Director of photography: Antonio Macasoli.
Art director: Enrico Trovaglieri, Franco Gambarano.
Editor: Gabriele Variale.
Music: Carlo Rustichelli.
Cast and characters: Elsa Martinelli (Rosaria), Raul Grassilli (Andrea), Franco Sportelli (Francesco), Lia Rainer, Narcisa Bonati, Roberto Barbieri, Anna Davelo, Osvaldo Azzini, Bianca Verirosi, Luigi Carani.
Production company: Cinematografica 61.
Italian distribution: Atlantisfilm.