24° Glocal Film Festival | Intervista ad Alberto Barbera

Many things, of course. Well, these are rooms that I started to frequent when I arrived in Turin. I moved to Turin from Biella in the early 1970s, and naturally the Unione Culturale was one of the reference points for anyone interested in the cultural life of the city, right? So I attended it first as a student. And I remember many screenings made before the room that would later become the Movie Club was renovated, but there were already screenings in a basement. I remember, for example, seeing Tarkovsky's film 'Andrei Rublev,' which was censored but circulated clandestinely in Europe in places like these, in left-wing cultural venues where they showed films that were unwelcome to the regime, even though it was a place frequented by convinced communists, etc. And it's a lot. I remember a great screening of Dziga Vertov. I, by the way, at the time was working with a group of students on Dziga Vertov's films. I remember a heated debate here one evening when we were interrupted by a militant who said, 'Enough talking about theory, let's talk about practical things, let's talk about the workers.' Those were the times when you couldn't talk about cinema except through the filter of the workers' struggles, etc.

I remember naturally the relationship between AIACE and the Unione Culturale. I had entered AIACE very early, in 1974, as a collaborator. I had started by making the cards for the films that were then released in the cinema of the self. I had become, in short, a kind of right-hand man of Federico Peiretti, who was the secretary of AIACE. And then I left for military service in 1975. During this absence, AIACE had started a close collaboration with the Unione Culturale to build this new room, which then actually became the Movie Club room. There was also a violent conflict between the two secretaries of the two associations, because the costs had escalated beyond measure, well beyond the estimate. And if I remember correctly, this was the version that circulated in AIACE, the Unione Culturale demanded that this cost increase be paid by AIACE. Naturally, the board of AIACE had opposed it, had become furious, going so far as to demand the resignation of Federico Peiretti. And I, in the meantime, had returned from military service, was a young man, as they say, a bit naive, but they asked me to take his place, which I did naturally. In the meantime, the cinema had opened, it was called Unistudio in its first version, and was managed jointly by AIACE and the Unione Culturale. I don't remember how the issue of the costs of setting up the room was resolved, but somehow a conclusion was reached, but then other problems arose, management conflicts because the Unione Culturale wanted full control over the management of the room. AIACE, on the other hand, wanted to program the room and therefore have control, let's say, cultural if nothing else. A new conflict that led to the definitive break.

The Unione Culturale decided to assign the management of the room to the Movie Club, effectively excluding AIACE. This is obviously not a positive memory because it's a lost battle. I had to, I remember a meeting with a lawyer who was supposed to mediate between AIACE and the Unione Culturale, with the presence of the Movie Club and Conventavoli, who didn't exactly act as a mediator, I must say, because he somewhat took sides, indeed decidedly sided with the Movie Club, and so it ended with the Movie Club taking the room until it could, because then after the famous fire of the Statuto, everything changed. Rules for safety reasons meant the room could no longer be used, because the conditions to guarantee safety in case of accidents were not met. These are the original memories that come to me about this place. I'm happy to see that it still exists, that it remains, that it is a left-wing cultural stronghold, in a city where many things have changed, and this continuity is instead a reassuring sign, let's say, in a context like the current one where many things instead only worry us.

Well, look, first of all it must be said, something well known, that Turin has always had an extremely strong, rooted, historical relationship with cinema itself, dating back to the origins of the history of cinema. Cinema was born here, it was born in Turin. Here were the major production centers, the most important films that were denied to the great season of Italian cinema were born and produced. Cinema then moved after the end of World War I to Rome for financial and also political reasons, as we know. Turin tried in vain for many years to bring productions back to Turin. It tried with Lux, it tried with other production companies without ever succeeding, but a strong cultural bond with cinema remained, so much so that a lot of film magazines were born in Turin, then they may have disappeared, but Turin has always been a very cinephile city. Then, starting from the 1980s, there was a leap in quality, in the sense that the birth of the festival on one hand, and a few years later the creation of the new museum of cinema and the Turin Film Commission, gave an extraordinary impulse to the entire city's cinema system, with ramifications and influences that affected the entire Piedmont region. So Turin returned to being one of the cities where, as they say, contemporary cinema was made, produced, realized, thought about, and discussed in critical and theoretical terms in those years, with a great capacity for investment in the future, a great capacity for having a vision, destined to feed a virtuous process that then brought contemporary results.

The Turin Film Commission is certainly not only the first major national film commission, but today it is certainly one of the most active, most effective, with a significant budget, with a capacity to invest in supporting not only feature films but also documentaries, short films, and therefore with a capacity to impact the city and regional territory that is extremely significant both in cultural terms, of course, and in economic terms, because as they say, it is now established that every euro invested in supporting film productions has a return of three and a half times the investment. So it's not money, as they say, given away to a sector and its workers, but it's money that returns to the territory in terms of visibility, promotion of the territory itself, but also significant economic returns for all the activities that revolve around film production and cinema activity in general. And from this point of view, I must say that the results have been quite extraordinary. The original vision of those councilors who had intuited the possibilities linked to an investment in culture has been fully realized, often even going beyond original expectations, with perhaps moments of greater difficulty related to a decrease in available resources, etc., but it seems to me that today we have returned to that original vision, updated and modernized, because in the meantime many years have passed, many decades.

Limits, I don't see many. Perhaps there is someone who is better at selling themselves, better at promoting themselves than we are. The Piedmontese understanding also in this case sometimes penalizes us a bit, we invest little in the ability to enhance what we are, what we manage to produce, and the results we manage to obtain. Others perhaps do much less, but know how to sell themselves better and therefore appear a bit more than our city and our territory manage to appear. But this is actually the only limit I really see, because for the rest, Turin and Piedmont remain an absolute excellence territory that is recognized by workers, enthusiasts, those who love cinema, etc. The Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin is today recognized as one of the most important, most successful, and most fascinating museums in the world, not to mention its collections, the capacity of the Film Commission to operate actively in an industrial context, which is also very competitive like the current one.