Well yes, it’s one fable. There is a setting poised between harsh reality and fantasy, there is a love story that blossoms late but triumphs in the end, there is also a bad-bad guy, with haunted eyes like Jack Nicholson, whose horrid plots are ultimately defeated. On the other hand, fairy tales, from the time of Aesop to those of Walt Disney and Harry Potter, have had a profound effect on the soul and culture of humans.
Reading the plot in a newspaper or on a website “A world apart”the film that the director Riccardo Milani has set in Park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise, it may seem like a banal story. When the light in the theater goes out, and the screening begins, the audience immediately starts laughing.
It is impossible to react in any other way in front of Antonio Albanese, dressed in a jacket and moccasins, floundering in the middle of a snowstorm. It’s hard not to get excited when thanks to Virginia Raffaele (how good!) and to the residents of Clifflocals successfully lent to the cinema, the village where the action takes place, you begin to hear the local dialect.
“Freghete!”, in reality, it is used more towards Teramo, Pescara and the coast, perhaps that “damn Maiella” it’s a bit obvious, the ovations arrive when the protagonist takes it out on the husband she’s chasing “all the sluts of the Peligna Valley”or indicates who tries to block her way as “a big piece of c…”. The greeting would require subtitles “I’m going to see you”that is, “I’m going to lie down”, “I’m going to bed” with which a traffic policeman greets the teacher Michele who has recently arrived in town.
Anyone who doesn’t know how to light a fire, it doesn’t matter whether in the stove, in a fireplace or outdoors, should learn from the child Cesidio (a name that has been widespread in Pescasseroli for centuries) who explains to the half-frozen teacher that after paper and first you need beech wood logs “two or three pine cones and two shotguns”in the sense of sticks that catch fire well.
Along with the laughter, the magic of the places also immediately arrives. The road that climbs from Fucino towards the heart of the Park runs through a white desert in winter, when the arriving master travels along itand in a green ocean in summer, thanks to the leaves of the beech trees and the meadows.
Rupe, which in the real world is called Oopsis a row of houses perched on a hill, cut by a single road and overlooking a panorama dominated by the Mount Marsicano. It is no coincidence that the only one capable of portraying it effectively was a master of the relationship between reality and fantasy such as the Dutch Maurits Escher.
Around the town and its inhabitants live wolves, deer, eagles and bears, in a clip at the end of the film theAmarena bear accompanied by her four teddy bears. The protagonist of a fairy tale born among smiles in 2020, and ended badly in 2023 when first the restless young bear Juan Carrito and then her mother were badly killed by man.
Let’s get back to Rupe, though. The heart of the village, and of its social cohesion, is the small elementary school named after the poet shepherd Cesidio Gentile known as “Jurico”, where a multi-class group brings together seven first, third and fifth graders. The ministerial bureaucracy, and the perfidy of a school director who works in Castelromito (actually Castel di Sangro) risk causing it to close, and therefore breaking up the town.
Master Michele (Antonio Albanese) falls into this world to escape an inhumane school, in an extremely inhumane Roman suburb. The vice-principal Agnese (Virginia Raffaele) experiences this reality with suffering, because every day she has to travel to and from Sulmona by car, and because the story of her Rupe school reminds her of that of Spurthe village where she grew up, and where the closure of the school caused her to abandon the town.
Sperone, unlike Castelromito and Rupe, is called exactly that, and its abandoned houses and tower are today a warning about the fate of the villages of the Apennines. The name of the protagonist is yet another homage to Abruzzo, because “Agnese”, written in 1979, is one of the best-known songs by Ivan Graziani, from Teramo in Abruzzo.
Master Michele, as a city environmentalist, starts off on the wrong foot. He arrives quoting Jonathan Safran Foer’s book which teaches how to “save the world before dinner” in front of his knowledgeable children, while the book by the Calabrian sociologist Vito Teti who teaches the value of “remaining” is waved under the noses of a couple of angry parents. the alternative to emigration and depopulation.
The father of one of the boys listens and understandably gets angry, placing the unfortunate teacher among the city environmentalists who “they come here to look at the streams and the foliage” (with the wrong French pronunciation), and they ignore the hard life of the mountains outside the most beautiful seasons. “Forget the remainder, here we only know the departure!” concludes the father. “Life here becomes a blessing only when you die!” his wife echoes him.
Telling the film’s plot in full is incorrect, and we leave the pleasure of discovering it to the viewer. It is worth noting that, to oppose those who want to permanently close the school, Agnese and Michele turn to the children of emigrants already rooted in Abruzzo (those who arrived from Morocco, who have been working in the Fucino fields for years) and those who have just arrived from Ukraine devastated by Putin’s bombs and tanks.
It’s nice to present it to the press “A world apart”Riccardo Milani and the production of the film chose the Pescasseroli cinema, created and managed by a group of local enthusiasts and named after Ettore Scola, a director who (like today Riccardo Milani, his wife Paola Cortellesi and the writer Dacia Maraini) loved spend your holidays in these parts.
“I spent my childhood in the Madonie Park and in a small village in front of the Resegone. A movie never changes me, but in two months of filming I rediscovered the silences of this world inhabited by respectable people. And then I had never seen wolves” said Antonio Albanese to the presentation. “I’ve never been to the mountains but I felt at home here, so much so that, instead of returning to Rome, I even stayed on free weekends: what was I going back to do?” added Virginia Raffaele.
“The concept of community has always run through my cinema and my life” concluded Riccardo Milani, who dealt with schools in “Congratulations professor”of disability in “I run to you” and of the difficult relationship between center and periphery “Like a cat on the ring road”. The director’s choice to star in is worthy of applause – and with excellent results “A world apart” dozens of inhabitants of Pescasseroli.
Rupe’s fairy tale with a happy ending, it must be said, tells of an Italy where the ending is often different. Between 2012 and 2015, 236 schools closed throughout Italy. The reduction in births and therefore in students, together with the Ministry’s budget problems, mean that the ax of cuts threatens 900,000 students, 12% of the total, who live in centers with less than 5,000 inhabitants.
The list of villages where schools have closed ranges from Rorà, near Pinerolo, in Piedmont, to Roccaforte del Greco sull’Aspromonte, in Calabria. In 2023, the parents’ revolt saved the school in Tarsogno, in the Parma Apennines. The tale of Rupe, in Abruzzo, tells a national and concrete drama.
