“The walls of Bergamo”, a great documentary to reflect

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It was one of the most intense and important films of the last Berlin Film Festival and now it has also arrived in our cinemas: we are talking about “The walls of Bergamo”, the new documentary by Stefano Savona.
Inserted in the Encounters section of the German event, the film takes us back to the nightmare that Bergamo experienced in March 2020: the pandemic that has scourged the whole world has attacked the city ruthlessly.
This documentary retraces those deserted streets, that terror that thickens day after day, isolating us and distancing us from the others we end up fearing, physically and psychologically. Separated families, those unforgettable lines of coffins outside hospitals.
Doctors, nurses, ordinary people tell their point of view in a product capable of making you think.

Born in Palermo in 1969, Stefano Savona signed a work of great courage, with the help of his former students from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia who played a notable role within this production: a documentary on the outbreak of the pandemic is already in itself something complex to think about, but the way in which the director and his crew have decided to document such a tragic moment in our recent history is even more interesting.

A collective therapy

Personal mourning becomes collective mourning to be elaborated through the stories and images collected in this documentary that does not leave us indifferent and which transforms into a real group therapy for us spectators. Savona confirms himself as an important director of contemporary Italian cinema, after the equally touching “La strada dei Samouni”: through an always essential, minimalist and never rhetorical style, the author makes us participate in a real group therapy with a great psychoanalytic depth. It reflects on the trauma, on the fear of death and on a series of extremely delicate issues, difficult to tell and even more difficult to represent: “The walls of Bergamo” is not only a film with a strong historical and also political depth, but above all a feature film of great humanity, absolutely not to be missed and among the most significant titles released at the cinema in this first part of 2023.

Armageddon Time

Another of the most anticipated titles of the weekend is “Armageddon Time”, the new film by James Gray. It can undoubtedly be said that the American director has returned home with this film which seems to be strongly inspired by his past: we are in fact in the Queens of the Eighties, where Gray grew up, and what develops is a very personal coming-of-age story. The very young protagonist Paul is facing a fundamental moment of his adolescence, both within a school environment that he fails to appreciate, and in a family nucleus marked by a conflictual relationship with his parents and by his affection for his grandfather. There are several socio-political references in this small but ambitious project, sincere and yet rather fragile due to a narrative without great scope. However, several passages that are a little too didactic alternate with moments of considerable emotional strength, capable of touching very deep and moving chords: among these, the scenes in which the protagonist confronts his grandfather, played by an always excellent Anthony Hopkins.