GIORGIO DIRITTI’S VIEW OF THE MOUNTAINS
Ethics and responsibility are key words in the cinema of Giorgio Diritti. His filmography is not particularly lengthy, since the start of each film comes from a need to speak, to tell a story or recount a character on the screen, with words and visions, in the desire to contribute to changing a way of looking at the world. So, this involves research, comparison, dedication, dialogue, historical coherence, real life, faces, and places. Above all (first and foremost) is the meaning that history brings to the present, to our way of being men today. This is fully coherent with the lessons of the Maestro, Ermanno Olmi, who with Mario Brenta and Toni De Gregorio led us – in that cenacle that was Casa Serena, in Bassano del Grappa – in a complex, formative and, in certain respects, hypnotic, experience called the Ipotesi Cinema, the seat of memory.
The Maestro came down from Asiago and talked to us about life, about things that matter, about values, about responsibility. About our responsibility as authors. Ipotesi Cinema left its mark and it was there, in the early 1990s, that we got to know each other. We fraternized. We became friends. Not right away. It was a subject of mine, the one in Il vento fa il giro, that ignited the spark. Giorgio fell in love with it, and it became his first feature. The story that inspired it is known by many. I had experienced it firsthand in the village in the Alps where I still live.
It had been the great dream to see the rebirth of a village emptied by the massive postwar emigration of peasants and mountain dwellers who had left to become workers in Turin and the Po Valley hinterland. Up here, stone houses and entire hamlets were falling apart. I had called them “the Pompeiis of the Alps.” Meadows and fields no longer mowed or cultivated were overrun with brambles. In January 1993, a young family of outsiders arrived from the Pyrenees. They were looking for such a place, where they could live in peace and raise their four children. They were farmers, shepherds, with cows and goats. People who lived off the land. For the few of us left, this was a promise of a future. Completing the film required a great effort, but Giorgio, ever tenacious, knowing that he was dealing with a theme that dialogued with the present, was able to overcome every obstacle. At first the film was received with general indifference, and then, because of the events of life, which perhaps are in God's great and small plans, Il vento fa il suo giro became a success. It was an absolute novelty within the panorama of Italian cinema. In Il vento fa il suo giro Giorgio had made the choice to have the protagonists (all chosen from among non-actors) speak the local Occitan dialect. Obviously, I liked the choice, because since my early twenties I have been a staunch supporter of the preservation and revitalization of so-called minority languages.
Giorgio drew from real life, he drew inspiration from it, and language was part of it, as was body language: postures, ways of speaking, attitudes in which characters, hierarchies, and an inner vision are reflected, for better or for worse. Even later, he remained true to this choice. He was so in the three films that the Film Festival della Lessinia screens in this homage to the cinema of Giorgio Diritti. After the Occitan of Il vento fa il suo giro, Apennine Bolognese was the prevalent language in L'uomo che verrà, while the slang of the Yenish nomads is in Lubo, the last film in chronological order. He stayed with this choice in Un giorno devi andare, filmed in the Amazon, and in the winner of multiple awards at the David di Donatello, Volevo nascondermi, inspired by the life of Toni Ligabue, the “crazy” painter of the Lower Po Valley, a fossil of the times in which man dialogued with nature and knew its language, an imaginative outcast who painted tigers, gorillas, lions, and jaguars, not in the jungle but among the oxbows of the Po.
I could now talk about the many awards won by Giorgio, the many festivals and flattering words of film critics, but my friendship for the Bolognese director, a companion in many other adventures, leads me to remember how in my eyes the criticism of greatest value, the medal that I would like to place on his chest, is the judgment of my mountain people, of my people from the Occitan valleys, certainly not regular cinema goers, who, after more than twenty years, when they talk about a film do not allude to any other work by a great director, whether Italian or foreign. For them, “the film,” the only one they carry in their hearts, the only one that made them reflect on the human condition and that induced them (sometimes) to change their point of view is Il vento fa il suo giro, directed by Giorgio Diritti.
Fredo Valla
