Carlo Giuliani died on the streets of Genoa during last year's G8 riots. Now his story has been told in one of a string of films inspired by the three days of protests. Dave Calhoun reports
Dave Calhoun Friday November 15, 2002 The Guardian
It's July 2001, and in their second-floor headquarters in the centre of Genoa, a group of Italian film-makers are taking a break from filming the protests surrounding the G8 summit. Thirty-two Italian directors are working out of this building, each of them sporadically venturing out into the hot, tense city to film the demonstrations for a documentary which will eventually filter over 200 hours of footage into an hour-long film, Another World Is Possible.
This exceptional group includes many eminent names from several decades of Italian cinema, including Ricky Tognazzi, Ettore Scola and Gillo Pontecorvo (the maker of the 1966 masterpiece Battle of Algiers). One film-maker, Daniele Segre, explains how it is dangerous to film on Genoa's streets; both police and protesters are reacting badly to the abundance of cameras. Earlier in the day, a protester kicked a camera off the shoulder of one of Segre's team and stamped on it.
These film-makers are not alone. On the crowded streets of Genoa, which are littered with burning bins and spent tear gas cases, cameras are everywhere. Now, over a year later, it's no surprise that films are still emerging about the three days of protests when violent clashes between police and protesters made headlines. Earlier this year, Another World Is Possible screened on Italian TV and at the Berlin film festival, while Francesca Comencini's Carlo Giuliani, Ragazzo - about the one protester who died from a police bullet - and Roberto Torelli's Bella Ciao have both shocked film festival audiences with their unrelenting depictions of police brutality.
Now Comencini has brought her film to this year's London film festival. It is a hard-hitting documentary about Giuliani, the 23-year-old shot dead on the Friday afternoon of the protests. Comencini's film has brought together documentary footage from many sources to reconstruct the events leading up to Giuliani's death in graphic detail. The film shows Giuliani being shot and his lifeless body run over by a police van. It also repeats claims by witnesses that police officers stubbed out cigarettes on Giuliani's body and tried to deflect the blame for his death on to his fellow protesters.
Comencini also challenges the idea that Giuliani was a sad, unintelligent loner - "homeless and unemployed, with a criminal background", according to some press reports after his death. The film convincingly discredits this view with statements from Giuliani's friends, as well as a long interview with his mother.
"On the same evening that Carlo Giuliani was shot they began to defame him," Comencini explains. "First, he was a victim because he was killed. Then he became a victim again because there was an operation to make him guilty. He was murdered twice."
The director of five feature films since her debut, Pianoforte, in 1984, Comencini was filming in Genoa as part of the collective of 32 Italian directors. With the support of the umbrella group that organised the protests - the Genoa Social Forum - each of them hit the streets of the besieged city with a small crew and wearing the bright red vest that identified them as film-makers.
The end result, Another World Is Possible, is a sober, balanced film that examines the broad sweep of events in Genoa that weekend. Comencini, however, felt that the sheer number of directors had diluted the project. It was not complete. Her feeling of unease centred on the death of Giuliani and the portrayal of that tragedy by the Italian authorities. Comencini remembers: "While politicians did not hold back from assuming things about the life of this boy, his parents were immediately quiet and calm and forgiving. I was impressed by this capacity for tolerance and control. And I said to myself, 'This is Italy. Italy is not only Berlusconi, but people like this too.' And I was proud."
Comencini met Giuliani's mother, Haidi, and together they decided that Comencini would make a film. Giuliano, Carlo's father, accompanied Comencini to Cannes to introduce the film to its first audience and to answer questions. Carlo's parents are as much the authors of Carlo Giuliani, Ragazzo as Comencini.
Meanwhile, Roberto Torelli's damning documentary Bella Ciao (not, unfortunately, showing in London) is very much its companion piece. Torelli edits footage shot by cameramen from Rai 2, the Italian state-owned television channel, to construct a chronological account of the three-day long demonstrations. Its graphic depictions of police assaults on protesters - as well as suggestions that some Italian police on duty in Genoa were unashamed fascists (a cameraman finds a discarded policeman's wallet which contains a photo of Mussolini) - have meant that Bella Ciao has yet to be broadcast on Italian television. However, it stands as overwhelming evidence of the Italian police's heavy-handed and violent response to a largely non-violent body of protesters.
While these films are not courts of law, they have succeeded in maintaining interest in what happened that weekend in Genoa, especially by turning the wider public's attention on the behaviour of the Italian police. Indeed, this May the Italian judiciary announced that they were investigating a further 50 police officers, after initially denying there was cause for such an inquiry. The collective film project which Comencini and others contributed too has also been repeated elsewhere - at this year's protests in Porto Alegre in Brazil among others.
It is hardly surprising that, when the police in Genoa raided the Genoa Social Forum's independent press centre (a school converted into a makeshift office) on the final night of the protests, one of their first targets - according to witnesses in the building - was film footage. Prosecutors are still investigating 77 Italian police on suspicion of violence during the protests, and some of the strongest evidence of individual cases has been caught on film. Almost 18 months since the smoke cleared in Genoa, cinema refuses to let the matter lie.
Carlo Giuliani, Ragazzo screens in the London film festival tomorrow and Monday at the NFT, SE1. Box office: 020-7928 3232.
<http://film.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4546231,00.html> -- Yoshie
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