Three awards, three words to keep in mind. Each takes you back to different contexts: life, the environment, art. And they somewhat recall the phrases of Matteo Garrone in the final spot on cinema, at the presentation of the statuettes for Donatello’s David which consecrated the value of the multi-award-winning work, “Io Capitano”, together with “There’s Still Tomorrow” by Paola Cortellesi: cinema encompasses all the arts, and therefore theatre, photography, painting, music. For this reason it should be brought to schools. The reason is simple: it embodies a concentration of values and offers symbolic elements in an enveloping and engaging emotional frame. So convincing. Much more than the bla bla bla ex cathedra, often greeted with yawns.
Enveloping, engaging. And convincing. Just like “I captain” or “There’s still tomorrow”, in fact. Life, the environment, art: when courage, imagination and wisdom mix quality ingredients, masterpieces are mostly born. Even in the rough filmic representation, in the distressing re-presentation of a painful event as it is “Laf Building”the first case of mobbing confirmed in Italy: the white segregation in the concentration camp department, the violent confinement in substance but not in form (because they were forced to do nothing) of 79 workers in theIlva Of Taranto at the end of the nineties, firm in their resolve not to give in to pressure for the demotion from employees to workers. A case that has made school and jurisprudence, in a factory very different from now, in a city that wants to be much more advanced than then.
Life reveals unexpected and surprising implications, for better or for worse, beyond any leap of imagination. Telling it – like the film by Michele Riondino – it is an act of love towards oneself and, above all, towards others. Even more so, towards those who will come. Because news is the first step in knowledge: knowing who and what, where and when, how and why, basic elements for awareness of what is happening around us. However, facts follow one another, new events undermine pre-existing ones and other emergencies force their attention. Only art can sublimate facts, removing them from the inevitable flow of novelties which sooner or later would relegate episodes and circumstances to various corners of remote memory, often destined for oblivion. And so a tragedy, a drama or an event, finally become or transformed into a work, climbs positions in individual memories and takes its place in the upper reaches of collective consciousness and feelings. History, as a shared heritage, is in the things that remain imprinted. In the episodes that have become emblematic and symbolic. Those that are impossible to ignore.
Here the environment, in its various meanings of context or nature, says a lot about the way of being and doing of a community, of a collectivity, of a society. Of his beliefs and propensities, his behaviors and attitudes, his vices and virtues. In “Palazzina Laf” everything refers to a difficult and complex reality, which quickly transitioned from the dream of industrialization as the prime mover of development to the misery of a factory as a place of exploitation without any respect for every single element necessarily on the front line: people, health, safety. And the environment: the word returns, even more heavily in the opening days of the appeal process in the investigation which revealed all the wrongdoings (so far only presumed, although a little less so after the very heavy first degree verdict) committed inside and outside the steel industry. “Sold out environment”, the name that could still be given before the Cartabia reform imposed caution, measure and balance in every phase of the judicial verification of the truth.
Taranto, emblem for the Puglia and for the South in many respects, starting from the historical, geographical and economic ones, it has a different future for itself: not only as a sacrosanct right, but also as a fact acquired due to the steps taken and the projects in the pipeline. And this despite the limits of a local policy that is often contradictory in its positions and for this very reason inconclusive in its results. The statuettes for the best leading actor, the best supporting actor and the author of the original soundtrack of “Palazzina Laf” – in order, with Riondino, Elio Germano And Diodate, from Taranto as the first on the list – are together the best viaticum for this path and the promising prediction for the results that can be achieved. Life, the environment, art. Three words, three prizes. They serve to trigger concrete discussions on probable projects for a future that is not only different, and would be the minimum, but above all better. Yet those three words will not be enough: others will be needed, there is no doubt. The important thing is to have marked a turning point. Where we arrive then depends on us.
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