Country: Italy
Year: 2023
Duration: 65'
Navigating freely among the images produced for the Italian Communist Party between the
1950s and the '80s by important Italian directors, and after encountering the gaze of
Luciana Castellina, the legendary communist politician and a founder of the “Manifesto,” a
woman who has never been orthodox and still today is a tireless organizer, Giovanni
Piperno ponders the significance of the “party-giraffe” - as Togliatti once defined it – and,
above all, what still remains of an experience that involved millions of people in an attempt
to transform themselves and the world. During the journey, he rediscovers the cinema of
that political generation: a cinema that was free, experimental, grass-roots, empathetic,
militant. As Zavattini says in the movie: “a cinema of many for many.”
Biography
film director
Giovanni Piperno
(Rome, 1964) worked as a photographer and assistant cameraman in movies and commercials; in 1997, he began making TV programs and documentaries. His films include L’esplosione, which won the Doc competition at the 2003 TFF and was nominated for a David di Donatello; This Is My Sister, which won the Avanti! award at the 2006 TFF; and Cimap! Centoitalianimattiapechino, which was presented at Locarno and won the 2009 Libero Bizzarri award. Il pezzo mancante (2010), about the Agnelli family, won the Cinema Doc competition at the TFF, while his next movie Le cose belle (2012), co-directed with Agostino Ferrente, participated at the Venice Film Festival and later won twenty-five national and international awards. The collective film 9x10 novanta (2014), produced by the Istituto Luce for its ninetieth anniversary, participated at the Giornate degli Autori in Venice and that same year he collaborated with Antonietta De Lillo on the documentary Let’s Go, out-of-competition at the 2014 TFF. In 2015, he presented the short films Se avessi le parole and Quasi eroi at the Rome Film Fest; this latter movie also won the Silver Ribbon for best short film. In 2017, he made the video installation L’energia degli italiani for the Italian pavilion at the Expo in Astana, Kazakhstan, and in 2018, the web series Ogni santo 23. In 2020, he presented the short Come si scrive ti amo in coreano in Rome and that same year he taught documentary directing at the Gian Maria Volonté Film School. In 2021 he presented Cipria.
FILMOGRAFIA
Ebrei in Sudafrica (coregia Laura Muscardin, cm, doc, 1992), Black Taxi (coregia Laura Muscardin, cm, 1993), Mosè a Bombay (coregia Laura Muscardin, cm, doc, 1994), Bananine unipolari (cm, doc, 1997), Il mio nome è Nico Cirasola (mm, doc, 1998), Intervista a mia madre (coregia Agostino Ferrente, mm, doc, 1999), Verdi Suprême (cm, doc, 2002), L’esplosione (doc, 2003), This Is My Sister (mm, doc, 2006), Cimap! Centoitalianimattiapechino (doc, 2008), La danza delle api (coregia Giulio Cederna, mm, doc), Il pezzo mancante (doc, 2010), Le cose belle (coregia Agostino Ferrente, doc, 2012), Miracolo italiano (ep. di 9x10 novanta, 2014), Chiedi a papà (serie tv, doc, 2015), Almost Heroes (cm, 2015), Viale Giorgio Morandi (2017), Lamiya (cm, 2019), Voci a domicilio (cm, 2019), Come si scrive ti amo in coreano (cm, 2019), Cipria (2021), Sedici millimetri alla rivoluzione (doc, 2023).
Declaration
film director
“This movie springs from two parallel encounters: one with Luciana Castellina (the living memory of a political experience of the past that now seems finished and unrepeatable, but also, and still today, an indomitable activist), and one with the Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico [Audiovisual Archive of the Democratic and Labour Movement]. Actually, my first encounter with the AAMOD dates back to 1996 and since then I have never stopped collaborating with them. But I had never studied in depth its wealth of militant movies made by great filmmakers (Scola, Maselli, Mangini, Bertolucci, Pontecorvo, Gregoretti, Miscuglio, Polizzi, Giannarelli, Serra , and many others).”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR: Giovanni Piperno. STORY: Giovanni Piperno, Luca Ricciardi. SCREENPLAY: Alessandro Aniballi, Giovanni Piperno. EDITING: Paolo Petrucci. MUSIC: Valerio Vigliar. SOUND: Fabio Santesarti, Niccolò Bosio. CAST: Luciana Castellina. PRODUCER: Luca Ricciardi. PRODUCTION: Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico. COPRODUCTION: Struttura di missione anniversari nazionali ed eventi sportivi nazionali e internazionali presso la Presidenza del Consiglio dei ministri, Rai Teche.
CONTACT: AAMOD (Luca Ricciardi) ricciardi@aamod.it
