Against the backdrop of a Turin in post-industrial transition and a semi-depopulated Calabria, a family of Calabrian immigrants faces a journey into the double identity in search of the causes that led to its eradication during the period of the Italian economic boom.
Tullio, a former Fiat worker, plays the role of a «Ulysses from Pavia» who with his Turin-branded Fiat 126 travels through the Stilaro Valley in Calabria, his place of origin in a constant movement of rediscovery.
He is accompanied by Rita, his wife, a modern Calabrian cummara emancipated in the north, but closely connected to her place of origin and traditions. Like her aunt Carmela who arrived years earlier in the public housing in via Artom, she is a remnant of an archaic way, a penelope that runs and waits. Antonio, Rita’s nephew, years after her, is forced to abandon his land to go to work in the north. History repeats itself once again.
Between northern and southern Italy, Tullio and Rita meet characters from an archaic and forgotten Calabria whose stories are intertwined with the places and memories of a distant industrial Turin.
Between symbolism, the dream world and the real world, they highlight the effects that the great Italian wave of migration has left in the south, in their land, but also in the north, the place to which they moved, through the double gaze of those who left, without ever leaving.
Director’s notes
«Ombre a Mezzogiorno» is a reflection on the phenomenon of the great Italian internal migration that occurred between the 1960s and 1980s. In those years, trains loaded with human material left from a peasant South to land in an industrial and mechanical North. Men, women and entire families set out in search of a closer’ «America». On those same trains, my family also took part in the exodus, tearing themselves apart.
Calabria and Piedmont: two regions separated by over 1,000 kilometers of Italy. Despite my attachment to them, I can’t be a deep part of them. I am witness and involuntary product of this historical transition which radically links me to these two territories, so distant and different. The need to clarify pushes me to delve deeper into this phenomenon, to analyze the places where I grew up and how they transformed and evolved.
«Ombre a Mezzogiorno» is a journey into the geographical and cultural memory of Italy. As in a game of mirrors, the vision of a semi-depopulated Calabria is reflected in the open wounds left by the large abandoned factories of Turin. The microhistory of Tullio, and his family, is the starting point for a broad and profound reflection on the world of work, on the role that industry and the union have had in Turin as in Italy, on the effects generated by the great internal migration at the two extremes of a country, from the point of view of the migrant and his dual identity.
