NEWS E PAGINE (9)

Italian Documentary: Towards Fiction?

Following in the footsteps of the great lesson of neo-realism, Italian cinema in recent decades has put the critical perception of a country in transformation back at the centre of its discourse, relying with ingenuity and courage on direct confrontation with reality.

After a period of stylistic and formal stagnation, between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, a new generation of filmmakers redefined the language of the documentary, laying the foundations for an era of renewal.

Filmmakers such as Alessandro Rossetto, Matteo Garrone, Alina Marazzi, Leonardo Di Costanzo, Alessandro Comodin, Francesco Munzi, Claudio Giovannesi, then Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, Jonas Carpignano, Roberto Minervini and Gianfranco Rosi, and more recently Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kaufmann, Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino have marked this rebirth, contributing to a movement that today seems to be increasingly moving towards fiction.

On Wednesday 6 November, at 6.30 pm, at the Cinema La Compagnia, Pietro Marcello and Alice Rohrwacher, two leading figures on the contemporary film scene, capable of narrating the contradictions of a beautiful and lost Italy and the wonders of a country uncertain between its rural past and a present marked by industrialisation that has never been fully realised, will talk together with Gabriele Genuino of Rai Cinema about the ‘cinema of reality’ and its future prospects. The meeting will be moderated by the academic Alma Mileto.


Alice Rohrwacher, to whom the Festival dei Popoli dedicated a tribute during the ‘Apriti Cinema’ event of the 2023 Estate Fiorentina, is one of the most interesting voices of contemporary Italian cinema. With a highly personal narrative style that interweaves social realism and dreamlike atmospheres, her films reflect on humanity, the bond with the past and the relationship with the present, with particular attention to characters balanced between society and marginality.

Pietro Marcello's works are distinguished by a fragmented narrative, the ability to reuse archive material and create a visionary cinematic language, poised between documentary and poetic narration. His work, deeply immersed in historical memory and the recovery of lost worlds, lies between experimentation and tradition, maintaining a living link with the past in contributing to the renewal of Italian auteur cinema.

Free event with Festival accreditation 

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