Like in the movie The star man Of Giuseppe Tornatore the Piedmontese director Remo Schellino uses his old Renault 4 to bring the magic of the big screen to the small towns and villages of the Cuneo area. Schellino he projects his films in places where cinema has never reached or where a small cinema theater once existed and now no longer exists. Unlike Sergio Castellitto, protagonist of Tornatore’s film, he doesn’t audition, he just shows his documentaries which talk about memories of the territory, peasant traditions, historical events. And surprisingly, in the age of streaming and digital platforms, his cinema under the stars in remote locations it is almost always sold out.
Remo Schellino was born in Dogliani in 1965 and since 1991 he has owned a small film production company. In his works he mainly deals with historical-social themes of the Langhe, Roero, Asti and the Cuneo valleys. At the same time it leads a private activity of archiving historical memory. With his camera he collects video interviews with people who would hardly find space in a history book, they are testimonies linked to the main events of the Italian twentieth century which are told from another perspective. His model is the writer Nuto Revelli who, between the end of the 1960s and the first half of the 1980s, traveled through the poor countryside of the Cuneo area to collect the narratives and memories of women and men.
The director says: «I have always fought to give voice to the forgotten: the soldiers, the veterans, the farmers of the poorest countryside. Oral testimonies of experience are the true story. I listen to them, I ask short questions, I help the witness to dig inside himself, remember, put together the pieces of his life. I do it with absolute rigor, as if I were collecting a will, I record everything: the emotions, the long silences, the looks and the emotion.” His documentaries are self-produced and do not have access to large-scale distribution, hence the idea of setting up his old Renault 4 was born to take them to where they were born.
The director says: «I am a craftsman who, starting from an idea, shoots it, edits it, edits it and finally projects it where cinema rarely reaches. I am like a hazelnut cake maker who goes from fair to fair to make his products known.” He loads all the equipment into his car necessary to set up an entire outdoor cinema: from the projector to the screen, from the cables to the speakers. He only asks the countries that host him to make chairs and an electricity socket available. Very similar to a one man show Schellino takes care of everything. With his projections the director creates community, because the country comes together around a screen. His documentaries evoke memories and arouse emotions and so normally, after the screening, people stop in the square to discuss the film and to discuss the proposed theme, even when the temperature is not kind.
«Sometimes you wonder if people will come to see a documentary that lasts an hour and a half; yet, I have never had fewer than one hundred people at my screenings. I am convinced that people need to meet and talk again. My films are not online because I am interested in returning to community.” In Murazzano, a town of only 900 souls, last August 200 people gathered around the screen. The director arrives in the village with his old Renault 4 at five in the afternoon and begins to set up the open-air cinema under the watchful eye of the children and the elderly. «In small towns you arrive in July and August there’s nothing except the one bar open and you become a bit of an attraction. The kids want to help you put up the screen or it happens that an old man comes along and tells you his story.”
Once the open-air cinema has been set up, the background music starts and then in the late afternoon, as the old traveling companies did, Schellino gets back into the car and travels along the silent streets announces over the loudspeakers: «This evening at 9pm in Piazza Alfieri screening of the documentary». We therefore return to the origins as when, at the beginning of the history of cinema, there were street vendors who, traveling far and wide across the countryside, transmitted the magic of the seventh art. In the 1950s a character was known, called Cecu Cine (Francesco Cinematografo), who collected the films in Turin and went around on a motorbike to screen them in the towns of Cuneo. Schellino and so the heir of an ancient tradition. It is a magical and poetic world that resists despite the rapid changes of modernity. Last summer the director made 29 screenings and today his traveling cinema is ready to restart. This year too his old Renault 4 will be filled with documentaries that will be projected between earth and sky.
