In the end it was an Italian documentary - Sacro GRA by Gianfranco Rosi - that won the Golden Lion at the 70th Venice International Film Festival. The Golden Lion going to Sacro GRA represented a bit of a surprise among the films that populated this edition of the competition, characterised by refined animation (Kaze tachinu by Hayao Miyazaki), dystopia (The Zero Theorem by Terry Gilliam), aliens walking in Glasgow's city centre (Under the Skin by Jonathan Glazer), children's exploitation (Miss Violence by Alexandros Avranas) and necrophilia (Child of God by James Franco).
The documentary was shot around the Grande Raccordo Anulare (GRA), the ring road enclosing Rome in a deadly embrace that runs for roughly 70 km, and that easily turns into a trap for many inexperienced drivers.
Rosi unveils in his documentary a series of micro worlds populating the Raccordo, discovering life behind the cars and the noises, spotting among the others a botanist making audio recordings of the interiors of palm trees to detect and then poison the insects that are devouring them; a kitsch cigar-smoking prince doing gymnastics on the roof of his castle and a paramedic in an ambulance eternally on duty treating car accident victims along the vast road.
One of the best dialogues - or rather monologues - remains the one by the eel fisherman living on a houseboat beneath an overpass along the Tiber River who launches into a tirade against a newspaper article about imported eels in Italy.
The power of the film stands in that mixture of humanity (that also represents various states of mind) behind the concrete and in the way the director gives it a voice.
Director Rosi claimed in the official statement accompanying his film: "I carried Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities with me as I was scouting locations for the film. It is a book about travel, which I see as a relationship between a place and its inhabitants in the desires and the confusion that are generated by city life, and that we ultimately draw into ourselves. The book advances along myriad paths and allows itself to be carried along by a series of mental states that overtake and overlap one another. It has a complex structure that the reader can navigate depending on his state of mind and life circumstances. The book led me forward during the many months working on the film when the real GRA seemed to elude me, more invisible than ever."
Sacro GRA may not mark the final Renaissance of Italian cinema, but it shows that something is stirring: the 70th Venice Film Festival was indeed the first edition that admitted documentaries to the main competition and it's somehow symbolical that an Italian documentary won the prestigious award (besides no Italian film has won the Golden Lion since 1998).
Rosi's documentary may also be pointing wannabe directors towards a new genre: the architectural documentary or the architecturally oriented fiction film.
Foreign tourists who may be looking for your typical Rome locations will be disappointed, but cinema goers interested in spotting the real people living hidden away in our cities will love it. The Grande Raccordo Anulare becomes indeed a place where connections become possible, where histories, experiences and personal tales meet and combine, and where certain characters leave behind the sphere of liminality they are inhabiting to take centre stage.
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