email print share on Facebook share on Twitter share on LinkedIn share on reddit pin on Pinterest

VENICE 2007 Horizons Doc

Last stop : Lido

by 

Pietro Marcello's Il passaggio della linea (second Italian entry in the Horizons Doc section) takes us on board of the many express trains throughout the Italian peninsula. At night, those often rickety trains bring to work (or back home) legions of commuters – a mixed crowd that meets in the same wagons and gazes at the landscape through the same windows.

Arturo Nicolodi appears as the epitomy of this commuting humanity : at the risk of being arrested, this true freethinker has been sleeping in trains for years. Life, he says, has led him to become a homeless person and he adapted ("I go with the flow of my life") by sleeping in express trains, because "it is better than living in an almshouse".

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

If the voice of this ninety-year-old man still sounds very clear, the general ethnic, social and dialectal melting-pot turns every express train into a new Babel which often forces even the Italian native speaker to read the English subtitles to decipher the inextricable tangle of voices. And sounds. Indeed, as the train rattles away on its the rusty tracks, it reminds us of a time when travelling was noisy and the muffled aiport silence was the privilege of very few people.

Il passaggio della linea, was produced by Indigo Film (also represented in Venice by Bianciardi! and La ragazza del lago [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
), in association with Mercurio Cinematografica and with the support of the Libero Bizzarri Documentary Fund and Raitre.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

(Translated from Italian)

Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.

Privacy Policy