An iridescent carpet of stories, intertwined to form a plot that tells about Calabria and the people of Calabriathe most fascinating places and mysteries of this region. The breathtaking views and clucking courtyards, the rays of sunlight filigreed with dust from the artisan workshops and the rough hands that shape the very identity of this land. The 200 stories, which in seven years the photojournalist and documentary maker Saverio Caracciolo told in as many episodes for LaCrepresent this and much more. Each a small masterpieceeach created with the mastery and passion of an author who is interested in only one thing: telling the reality of a Calabria that often escapes the news and the attention of those who are now only used to scrolling reels on your mobile phone.
«The true story of a Calabria that has a lot to say and doesn’t want to be relegated in stale rhetoric or in black pages”, underlines the publisher Domenico Maduli, president of the Diemmecom Group which publishes LaC. «”Dignity” is the first word I associate with Caracciolo’s production – he explains – Dignity restored through his story to a region that lives, rejoices, suffers and narrates its beauty through a thousand facets».
Two hundred short films that often lead to poetry and are enclosed in a chest that can be opened a thousand times on LaC Play to admire priceless jewels of Calabrian humanity and nature.
«When the first episode aired – explains Caracciolo – I never thought I would cross this finish linealso because almost 10 years ago, when I joined the LaC TV family as director of photography and still photographer, I never imagined that one day I would become a documentary journalist. Before, being a professional photographer, I had a total rejection of video. But I put myself out there in a professional field that was totally unknown to me.”
Words that also reveal the approach of an author who to date he has collected dozens and dozens of national and international awards, without ever losing contact with a context imbued with humanity. Awards that arrived immediately, on the first attempt: «I tried my hand at a video documentary for the first time when I went to the tent city of Rosarno to create a reportage on the migrants hosted in the camp. The intention was to take photographs, as always, but when a migrant started telling me about his troubles I realized that it wouldn’t be enough. So I set my camera to video and started shooting.”
The result was an award-winning documentary film entitled Black Nightwhich masterfully documents a place where pity and hope often do not enter.
Another milestone of LaC Storie is the documentary film on the last charcoal burners of Serra San Brunowhich won awards at Film Festivals, despite all the protagonists speaking in strict Calabrian dialect. In some scenes it seems like we are witnessing the epic of the gold diggers in the Klondike at the end of the 19th centurywith men bent by fatigue, covered in coal dust from head to toe, but determined not to abandon their vein of black gold.
An author, Caracciolo, who can count on full harmony with his publisher: “First of all we are friends – underlines Maduli –, Calabrians among Calabrians who care about this land and how it is told.”
«Once – Caracciolo relaunches -, the great anthropologist Luigi Maria Lombardi Satriani he told me that LaC Storie represented for him Calabrian multimedia cultural anthropology. And this is the recognition that gratifies me the most.”
