“None is expected to be able to tell the world: someone can’t do it, someone can do it better.”

The documentary cinema of Segre as narration of an investigation about work was the topic of the master class which took place in Catholic University of Sacro Cuore, during the “Giornata del Cinema Gavioli” 2016.

Segre talks about a cinematographic experience coming from a self-question, highlighting that the enquiring look is not predictable at the beginning of the project. The director conceives the cinematographic act, a formative and initiatory experience, like a possibility to discover his own creative freedom. He says: “It’s the place that suggests me the film”. It’s precisely Rosarno with its citrus groves, that became a muse for the Venetian director in “Il sangue verde”. 57 minutes in which memory and work are mixed together, through the combination of current interviews and shots.

How the documentary cinema can be considered fundamental for the collective memory? That’s the implied question raised from the master class. Segre tells the story of one part of the Italian agricultural memory to the audience with his documentary. The director says: “Nowadays we don’t have any conception of the struggles made by our grandfathers and parents in order to work in fields: they did everything they could to make us not perceive it. With the documentary cinema pictures, smells and sounds take shape to tell us about that situation”. The physical and cultural difference between the Calabrian hire hand and the one of Burkina Faso, even if reciprocally far, thanks to the cinematographic medium can be pictured in the same way.

At the ending of the class, Silvio Grasselli – administrator of Musil – took the floor adding a short but meaningful consideration in order to let the young audience understand how important is the Museum aim to capitalize and archive all the contemporary audio-visual devices that in the next future will gain a considerable historical importance. After all, the situation in some vineyards of Franciacorta could be not so distant from the reality of Rosarno.

Federica Taddeo

Translated by Andrea Consalvi.