The Red Flower – Alice Rohrwacher

◆ We translated with director Luciana Fina The invention of love, a Portuguese poem written by the Cape Verdean poet Daniel Filipe during the dictatorship of António Salazar. The invention it was banned by the censors, and Filipe was persecuted and tortured. He did not have time to see the end of the dictatorship because he died in 1964, at 38 years old. His words inflamed the revolutionary hearts of the Portuguese ten years after his death. In the poem an authoritarian government tries to stop a dangerous epidemic of love: it closes schools, bans traffic, tries to arrest the two fugitive lovers who are spreading the terrible and sweet disease, which in the end will win over everything. On April 25, 1974, a peaceful revolution put an end to Europe’s longest-running fascist regime, which had suffocated Portugal for forty-eight years. The day was also chosen as a tribute to the Italian liberation. Soldiers, students and workers marched together against the regime, and as a sign of their nonviolence they placed a red carnation in the barrels of their rifles. There are many legends about the reason for the red carnation. I like to imagine that it is a reference to Filipe’s poem, in which a child infected by love suddenly asks for a red flower and cries in despair because it is denied to him. It is the flower that announces the essential and imminent epidemic of love in all the corners of the city in every corner of the city.