Narrative non-fictions in contemporary Italian cinema: Roberto Munzi's Saimir (2002), Giorgio Diritti's Il vento fa il suo giro (2005) and Pietro Marcello's La bocca del lupo (2009)

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn recent years a growing number of Italian film-makers have made a conscious effort to create a cinema that testifies to the great trends of the current epoch: globalization, emigration and displacement. A moral seriousness reminiscent of neorealism has re-emerged, accompanied by a return to the ethics and techniques of documentary which defined that earlier movement. The ambition to expose the country's vices, a goal shared among fiction and non-fiction film-makers alike, is implied in a struggle to express this new global environment. Beginning with the notion of ‘Empire’ as defined by Michael Hardt and Anotnio Negri, Luca Caminati investigates the changing social and cinematic terrain of Italy through the artistic production of current directors Francesco Munzi, Giorgio Diritti and Pietro Marcello. Their work recuperates motifs of the neorealist and cinema impegnato movements, while incorporating gestures from the new documentarians of their generation. These hybrid narratives represent a formally innovative political cinema that performs an oppositional function in the face of the new realities of Empire.