A break to recover

What was feared is happening. The long tail of the forced pause of productions during the pandemic and the US screenwriters' strike is leading to a shortage of good titles in theaters but - as the grandmothers make a virtue of necessity - they take advantage of a sometimes unrecognized opportunity such as the RAI app dedicated to the recovery and rediscovery of the works broadcast by our beloved/hated state TV.
RaiPlay is a free service that can turn out to be an Ali Baba's cave where, if you look carefully, the greatest masterpieces of the golden age of our cinema (The Leopard, Rocco and His Brothers, Bitter Rice, The Brancaleone Army) emerge together the best of Italian cinema in recent years often reported on this page and now possibly to be recovered:

LAZZARO FELICE by Alice Rohrwacher (2018): best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival the film is a story of a friendship in a peasant Italy of the 80s divided between progress and exploitation.

AMANDA by Carolina Cavalli (2022): a girl in search of herself confronts the past and the loneliness of those around her. Far from heavy moralism, the film is a surprising comedy capable of thrilling critics in Europe and the USA.

TITUS AND THE ALIENS by Paola Randi (2017): an Italian professor lives isolated in the Nevada desert in search of alien messages. The arrival of his two Neapolitan nephews destabilizes and renews the scientist's life.

SIDE A by Matteo Lena (2024): a series of documentaries on the history of RCA, the largest Italian record company. The birth of the 45 rpm record, summer hits, the advent of jukeboxes, singer-songwriters... a history of Italian society of the last century.

IL BUCO by Michelangelo Frammartino (2021): in 1961 a group of speleologists descended for the first time into the Bifurto Abyss, in the Pollino. A filmic and mystical journey into the dark, with almost no dialogues, awarded at the Venice Film Festival.


Davide Bracco
NP May 2024