I RECUPERANTI (Italy, 1969, 101′)

Monday 2 October, 6.00 pm, Palazzo della Radio – Rai Media Library

Event in collaboration with Rai Teche

Monday 2 October at 6pm, meet at the Rai Media Library at the Palazzo della Radio for a Job Film Days event in collaboration with Rai Teche. The screening of Ermanno Olmi’s film I recuperanti (Italy, 1970) is part of the Rai Cinema and Rai Teche series “Archive Alive!”, which invites the public to discover the great Rai archive. The film by the great director from Bergamo narrates the events of the mountaineers of the Asiago Plateau and was made expressly in color for Italian television and broadcast on the then national Rai program on 29 March 1970, seven years before the official launch part of Rai’s color television programmes. The screening will be introduced by Chiara Simonigh (Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures – University of Turin).

Access method: Free entry with mandatory reservation: mediateca.torino@rai.it

Direction, photography, editing: Ermanno Olmi
Screenplay: Mario Rigoni Stern, Tullio Kezich, Ermanno Olmi
Music: Gianni Ferrio
Cast: Andreino Carli, Antonio Lunardi, Alessandra Micheletto
Production: RAI-Radiotelevisione Italiana, Prod. Palumbo

At the end of the war, after having participated in the Russian campaign, Gianni returns to his country. Many things have changed in that mountain village where young people go abroad. With other men he starts working as an illegal woodcutter. The elderly and solitary Du offers them the possibility of making a good profit by recovering the remnants of the First World War scattered across the mountains to sell them to wholesalers coming from the city. At first hesitant, Gianni accepts the new job.

Ermanno Olmi (Bergamo, Italy, 1931 – Asiago, Italy, 2018), director, screenwriter, director of photography, editor, writer, spent his childhood between the working class world of the Milanese suburbs and the peasant world of Treviglio, in the Bergamo countryside. At the beginning of the 1950s he began working at Edison, for which he documented industrial production, making around thirty documentaries. In 1959 he made his feature film debut with Time Stopped, followed in 1961 by Il Posto, in which he describes the experiences of two young people looking for their first job. Simple people, daily life, feelings and the difficulty of expressing them, the peasant world, religion and spirituality are central topics in Olmi’s work. With The Tree of Clogs he won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978. He alternated feature films with short films and documentaries and in 1982 in Bassano del Grappa he founded the Ipotesi Cinema film school which became a point of reference for young authors. In 1983 he shot Camminacammina, a rereading of the tale of the Magi. New aesthetic approaches are developed in Long live the lady! and The Legend of the Holy Drinker (based on the story of the same name by Joseph Roth), while he tries his hand at fairy tales and the fantastic in The Secret of the Old Woods, based on the novel of the same name by Dino Buzzati and starring Paolo Villaggio. The Craft of Arms (2001) received nine David di Donatello awards. In 2007 he declared that Centochiodi was his last fiction film and that he would dedicate himself only to documentaries. His filmography, which ends in the name of documentary and themes linked to the environment and faith (See, I am one of you, dedicated to Carlo Maria Martini), however still includes two narrative works of great civil commitment such as The Cardboard Village and the meadows will return. He died at the age of 86.

Filmography (selected): Il tempo si è fermato (1959), Il posto (1961), I fidanzati (1963), E venne un uomo (1965), Racconti di giovani amori (La cotta, La regina, Il ragazzo di Gigliola) (1967), Un certo giorno (1968), Il tentato suicidio nell?adolescenza (T.S. Giovanile) (cm, doc., 1968), I recuperanti (1969), Durante l’estate (1970), La circostanza (1974), Lalbero degli zoccoli (1978), Camminacammina (1983), Lunga vita alla signora! (1987), La leggenda del santo bevitore (1988), Lungo il fiume (doc., 1992), Il segreto del bosco vecchio (1993), Genesi. La creazione e il diluvio (1994), Il mestiere delle armi (2001), Cantando dietro i paraventi (2003), Tickets (un episodio, 2005), Centochiodi (2007), Terra Madre (doc., 2009), Rupi del vino (doc., 2009), Il villaggio di cartone (2011), Torneranno i prati (2014), Vedete, sono uno di voi (doc., 2017).