Voices

Thirty years after the Basaglia Law, our film aims to recount the experience of a time that seems to be returning.
The closure of the Novara asylum meant, then, the end of a tragic and desolate place that, with its climate of violence and oppression, with its total frustration of basic needs, with its often inhumane living conditions, instead of healing, paradoxically created pathology.
Our short documentary "passes" through old corridors, abandoned rooms, and rediscovered objects that, thanks to the voices of the medical records of the time, bring back memories of never-forgotten suffering.
The closure of the asylum was therefore an act of courage born from a widespread atmosphere of concern and defense towards the weak, the insane, and those who were different. An atmosphere far removed from today's culture, which is proving increasingly sensitive to power relations rather than relationships of support, ready to marginalize, out of fear, those who, with their madness, inevitably remind us that their emotions, desires, thoughts, and fears are ultimately the emotions, desires, thoughts, and fears that live in the deepest regions of our hearts and minds.
This is why we believe it is appropriate to remember, once again, the mental asylum, once a place of confinement and suffering, now a tragic metaphor for exclusion.