Vajont
“Just a cool breeze and the light of the moon, nothing else. The piazza of Longarone was no longer, all you could see was mud”. This recollection is imprinted in the memory of Silvio Mezzari, a soldier in the Alpine regiment at the time, one of the first to arrive in what had been the centre of Longarone. “A human catastrophe, nature had nothing to do with it. This [tragedy] was caused by the superficiality and economic interests of the people and companies involved.” This is the accusation of Italo Filippin, one of the few survivors. “The dike is a work of extraordinary engineering, in fact it resisted the impact, The error was that of not taking into account the fragility of the mountain faces above the artificial lake”, according to the analysis of Giorgio Temporelli, an expert in dikes and the author of a book about the event.
For many years, the disaster of Vajont was shrouded in silence: the silence of the victims, but also of information. The tragedy of the dike was cause for national shame; to talk about it was taboo. The Film Festival chose to dedicate a small retrospective to the subject, with films from the period and testimony to remember the events of 50 years ago.
