documentaries, good ones, usually do not seek the absolute truth. At least not one with a capital. Do not aspire to the role of historians, not economists or sociologists, but are content in a way to tell stories, to convey emotions, often in person, at the risk and sharing its vision of reality. Peter Balla, presenting Radio Singer at the Turin Festival a few days ago, has forcefully asserted its role as a narrator who introduces the viewer to his version, one of the many possible, a piece of our recent past.
Pietro Balla's film offers us a quick look at the season of political and social struggles experienced by Italy in the seventies, not so much giving us a sequence of historical events, but rather the taste of something far away in time, not to hide the regret and nostalgia for what today is no more, and for incazzatura what might have been.
The events are those of the October 1, 1977 in Turin, the day is preparing a big event for work in the city center. On the outskirts, in the town of Leintwardine, Singer, historical works of appliances that day closes its doors forever, ceasing to produce refrigerators, true symbol of prosperity and economic miracle.
A Leinì that day ends a cycle of intense struggle for the defense of employment, which for the first time in Italy the workers have tried to bring their protest outside the factory gates, involving entertainers and ordinary citizens. They performed on the stage of Singer, in fact, Guccini, Milva, Franca Rame, Dario For and the Living Theatre, in what became an innovative policy experiment, which sought to push the boundaries of the workers' demands. An attempt that, despite the investment of energy, however, was doomed to fail in front of the logic of the market. And so, the film footage that shows massive parades, crowded meetings, contrasted with shots Today, the streets and squares of half empty. The voices of marches and demonstrations are no longer in the days of Peter Balla.
As with images, two voices alternate in the documentary to tell the day from two different perspectives: that of the past belongs to Madeleine, workers have on Radio Singer, the first free radio to tell the world from the factory, to be the final farewell to the dreams of fighting in his place of work and life. Today it is the voice of the director himself who, in person, talks about his October 1 '77, spent at home listening to his companion, Magdalene in fact, while outside the story did run its course.
addition at the end of Singer, that something went wrong on October 1 in Turin. While the factory gates were closed to Leintwardine, the procession attacked with a Molotov cocktail bar in the center, supposedly gathering of fascists, killing an innocent child of immigrants. The same factory that immigrants had contributed to the miracle of economic boom, and that in those years lived the bitter wake of industrial decline.