The force of necessity

On the occasion of the last Venice Film Festival, Italian cinema usually puts itself on display and this time too it was no exception and two works in competition did not betray expectations like those of Matteo Garrone and Giorgio Diritti.

Two films which, although set in very different places and eras seem to mirror and reflect each other, crossed as they are by issues which are unfortunately current and universal at the same time such as racism and oppression.

Garrone in I Captain follows the path of two young people from Senegal who try to follow the dangerous journey towards Italy full of pitfalls as we all (or at least almost all) know from testimonies direct or for journalistic insights. A work which, as often happens in the Roman director's films, takes up neorealist patterns but updates them in a personal and powerful style that marks a story with certainly predictable narration and characters.

Ritti in Lubo in turn moves away from a contemporary story to approach a story fictionalized by the Piedmontese writer Mario Cavatore in The Sower but which actually happened in Switzerland in the 1930s where Lubo, a nomad, tries to find his young children who were torn away from their family - while he was in the army - according to the national re-education program for street children. Here too the protagonist is forced by desperation to travel and in the director's words which are so timely «in the unfolding of events in Lubo it emerges how crazy principles and discriminatory laws generate an evil that spreads like an oil stain over time, penetrating the lives of men, changing their paths, their values, generating pain, anger, violence, ambiguity... but also a love for life and for their children that wants to survive everything and bring back justice".


Davide Bracco
NP November 2023