12/02/2012

A room less crowded than the expectations around the film would suggest today (February 12, 2012) hosted the screening of Diaz - Don’t Clean up this Blood [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Daniele Vicari
film profile] in the Berlinale’s Panorama Special section. This is the new film by Daniele Vicari (The Past is a Foreign Land), who once again throws the spotlight on one of the most debated pages of recent Italian history.

In July 2001, the Italian Government (then headed by Silvio Berlusconi) decided to host the G8 summit in Genoa. This choice, heavily criticised from the start due to this harbor city’s particular topography – narrow and maze-like streets, de facto uncontrollable -, turned out to be dramatic: Genoa was invaded by about 700 pacifist and no-global organisations and soon became an arena for extremely violent clashes between police and protesters, culminating in the death of one of them, Carlo Giuliani.

Faced with such rich material, Vicari chooses to make a real war-time film (packed with scenes depicting the masses and hundreds of stunts and appearances) centered around a single incident, the brutal assault by the police on the Diaz school and the violence of the Bolzaneto barracks.

The film, which is the fruit of research, over a good two years, into the court procedures, opens on a scene of urban guerilla war-fare and immediately it becomes clear that a battle is taking place in Genoa between black block and armed forces and that everyone, from citizens to protesters and all the way to the committee coordinating the anti-G8 protests (the Genoa Social Forum), is involved. The sense of chorality is reinforced by the director’s wish not to have a single lead character, but rather several characters moving around a city beset by chaos: a policeman with moral scruples (Claudio Santamaria), a journalist (Elio Germano) and several young people, moreover foreigners, which make up this colourful group of protesters.

In a syncopated structure, with jumps forwards and backwards in time, Vicari reconstructs the dramatic events of the night in which 400 policemen raided the Diaz school, which served as a dormitory for around 93 protesters and as a media centre, and the brutal fighting which ensued.

The director does not seem to want to spare us any details: the violence is all on show, except for some rare moments of real tension, when the screams of the beaten victims and the sound of the police’s stamping on the stairs reverberate in the dark.
The film alternates well-documented scenes of fiction with real footage from the night of the attacks and without omitting any detail, and materializes the physical and verbal torture suffered by the protesters arrested in the barracks of Bolzaneto.

Too distant from the events to be an on-the-spot reconstruction and too close for a clear historical analysis, Diaz – Don’t Clean up this Blood, the G8 according to Vicari, evidently aims to bring justice to the victims but does not manage to find a proper form, and therefore remains imprisoned in an agitated and confused mise-en-scene, in which the historical and political context is indecipherable, the divide between good and evil seems too clear-cut and the out-of-focus characters are too stereotyped.

Due to production and budget constraints, the Italian-Romanian production was shot in Bucharest, where 20,000 square meters of Genova were entirely reconstructed.

Diaz - Non pulite questo sangue, is produced by Fandango (Italy) together with Mandragora Movies (Romania) and Le Pacte (France), and will be distributed in Italy on March 2, 2012 by Fandango. Fandango Portobello is taking care of international sales.

(Translated from Italian)