At the end of the night – Journey into the dark side of nineteenth-century Turin arrives – right in the rainy Turin of the last month – in preview, at the Fratelli Marx cinema.
The docufilm, produced by the Vittorio Bersezio Foundation and made with the support of Film Commission Torino Piemonte, is directed by Michele Burgay. It also avails itself of the participation of the historian and journalist Gianni Oliva and of the extraordinary participation of Alex Belli And Delia Duran.
The intent is to retrace a specific historical period of Turin which had just lost its role as capital of the Kingdom (in favor of Florence), with a leap back of about one hundred and fifty years. The fulcrum of the narrative remains the study of the forms of crime that pervaded the social fabric of those years, facilitated by a more general climate of poverty and degradation.
A journey through time, which is above all dialogue
At the end of the night brings to the stage a journey through time lasting one hundred and fifty years. That is, since Turin, in 1865, lost its role as capital, and particular forms of violence, crime and poverty began to appear in the city.
The protagonists of this journey, to discover nineteenth-century Turin, are Vittorio Bersezio (founder of “La Gazzetta Piemontese”, which later became “La Stampa”), played by Roberto Accornero, and his friend Domenico Cappa, as well as marshal of the Public Security Guard. The latter played by Mario Brusa. Thanks to their past collaboration and their dialogue, in today’s spaces of “La Stampa”, the docufilm comes to life, which allows viewers to look into other lives, but with the city of Turin as its backdrop.
Stories of violence: the legend of the “Bela Caplera”
At the end of the night tells stories of violence suffered and caused, not with a judgmental intent, but rather with a narrative and investigative desire. We focus on various expressions of violence, such as the formation of gangs (called gang), their main protagonists and new forms of aggression, such as “stick crimes”. Up until that moment, in fact, the Piedmontese underworld had only used the knife. A ferocity that is constantly accompanied by economic, family and social difficulties: they are almost always stories of abandonment, misery and desperation.
Like the story of the “Bela Caplera”, whose real name was Maria Bel. She, a young prostitute, became the protagonist, together with her lover, of the murder of another prostitute, in the aftermath of a heavy quarrel. Her sentence, dated February 28, 1807, was very harsh for her: death sentence, by guillotine. The sentence materialized in Piazza Carlo Emanuele II, commonly known to the people of Turin as “Piazza Carlina”. The beauty of the woman and the severity of the sentence inserted this character into the collective imagination of the city, encouraging the birth of the most disparate legends.
What happened to the “magnificent and progressive fortunes”?
After a leap into the past, At the end of the night, returns to the present, as mentioned above, in today’s spaces of “La Stampa”. Here Bersezio and Cappa converse, remembering the years of their collaboration, and recalling past events. A third character is therefore added, who will only dialogue with Bersezio: this is Massimo Giannini, current director of “La Stampa” (at the time of making the docufilm).
The aim is to encourage a meeting – special and exciting – between present and future, in a space of participatory reflection. What has changed from yesterday to today? Violence is still there, wars too, and crime too. Human facts, while maintaining their individual specificity, even temporal, are more or less always the same. The world has changed, of course: technology has made giant strides, but it has failed to keep some promises, such as, for example, the achievement of true social equality.
At the end of the nightaccording to the director’s words Michele Burgay present in the room, therefore, delivers an open question. Addressed to the viewer:
“In the face of technological progress, what level is human progress? Exists?”
