“Here resignation is eaten in bites, like scamorza.”
This phrase, repeated several times in the newly released film A world apart, it effectively reflects the present of many mountain villages, eroded by depopulation, scratched by abandonment.
A human heritage that disappears even before truly vanishing, due to the resignation that advances hand in hand with the services that are gradually reduced, to the point of making a place difficult to live in. This is how the fateful short circuit is triggered: fewer inhabitants, fewer services, more resignation. Resignation to abandon one’s territory forever in search of somewhere else capable of guaranteeing a future free from precariousness.
It is a social dynamic that spreads from year to year, unfortunately embracing the Alps and Apennines, but which is not yet talked about much.: both on a political level and on a media level. Because of this A world apart turns out to be a precious film, because it brings to the big screen (today it has been shown in over five hundred national theaters) an Italian social cross-section known to few.
The plot, which sees the protagonists as protagonists Antonio Albanese And Virginia Raffaele in the role of teacher and vice-principal, it is set in the Abruzzo National Park, in a town where the school, with a single multi-class school, is forced to close due to a lack of students. With the right care, the director Riccardo Milani he decided to alternate exhilarating moments, where the sweetened gaze of the master accustomed to observing the mountains from the plain is highlighted, with rougher, at times melancholic passages, from which the difficulties that exhaust these territories emerge. To enhance the mountain character, some narrative excess, some forcing, some clichés were used: for example the wolf, a notoriously shy animal, appears several times. But it matters little: the underlying message is clear, as it isthe director’s desire to conclude the story by offering a perspective of hope is clear.
A hope which, however, once again, materializes only thanks to the willpower and civil ethics of individuals: what is indirectly denounced is therefore the absence of a political vision aimed at reactivating habitability dynamics in mountain territories; aimed at including what is now perceived as “a world apart”.
