Piccola Terra

“The sense of a complex need, where there was a great deal to interpret.” This was Michele Trentini and Marco Romano’s first impression when geologists at the University of Padua invited them to view some material in their possession and make a documentary about the Valstagna and Brenta Valleys in the province of Vicenza. It was immediately clear that the mountains were no longer the place to fight for depicted in Giuseppe Taffarel’s 1963 documentary Fazzoletti di terra (Plots of Land), a portrait of a harsh existence in a hostile environment which, insofar as it evoked the early films of De Seta, the two directors loved and decided to use almost in toto.

The mountains today can be studied and described as a place that tells us about our complex present, a place where, as Aziz, the Moroccan immigrant in the film, says, “We have begun to cultivate integration.” Between the characters of the past and those of the present, the clear difference is in their attitude to the land. The two elderly protagonists of Taffarel’s documentary give in to it, our contemporaries are ready – albeit sometimes diffidently – to resist and open to the future. This behavior opens an important space for debate that will underpin any future growth and the conversation about participatory democracy that emerges clearly in the film.

Trentini and Romano have decided to offer an anthropological account, expanding it to paint a portrait of the mountains that are returning to life thanks to those who cultivate the land of their grandparents, thus regaining possession of part of their identity and a tool for putting an end to destruction of the local area. The main aim of Piccola terra is to convey this conversation as clearly as possible, while offering a sometimes ironic and entertaining portrait of Italy’s strengths and weaknesses and its healthy/unhealthy relationship with the other. The harmony that the directors manage to create between the images of yesterday and those of today and the different stories and places of the same mountains is so strong that camera’s presence of is almost imperceptible. (www.radiocinema.it)