mANODOPERA
Type: Animation
Direction: Alain Ughetto
Cast: The original voices of Ariana Ascaride, Alain Ughetto, Stefano Pagani, Diego Giuliani, Cristoforo Gato
Don’t miss this film: it’s the best surprise of this start of the season, before the Venetian giants enter the field. It’s true that it’s an animated film (step-by-step, with puppets, like those in Wallace and Gromit) but here there is nothing (or almost) to laugh at, rather there is melancholy and the delicacy with which the director reconstructs the story of his grandparents, who emigrated from Piedmont to France at the beginning of the century.
Ughetto like him, Luigi and Cesira’s family learn to look for work where it is, for example across the Italian border, initially leaving his wife and small children at home, then making everyone follow him. Meanwhile the Ughettos come to terms with the war in Libya, then the Great War, hunger, accidents at work, the fascists…
The puppets, Italian immigrants, protagonists of Alain Ughetto’s animation.
Every now and then the director’s hand enters the field, to underline the sense of the story that the film has set out to do (reconstruct the story of the grandparents), but above all to increase that very sweet but no less truthful reconstruction of a world that has now disappeared yet still so full of truth and meaning.
Without nostalgia (the original title Interdit aux chiens et aux italiens needs no translation) but with lots of love. For those who want to find the poetry of step-by-step animation.
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