Piazza San Carlo, Turin at midnight. Under the arcades of the square to steal the attention of Domenico Calobristi, director and actor, there is a sadly common image in the heart of Turin. Near one of the elegant columns in the square is a temporary arrangement that includes blankets, umbrellas, and a sign. On the cartons placed in front of him, he wrote: “I lost my home thanks to those who helped me.”
He is a homeless man, and among the many who thronged the streets of downtown. The shot that Domenico Calobristi posted online also deplores the situation, focusing on the picture behind the situation of the homeless. On the column there is an advertisement for the luxury brand Chanel, which the director places under the heading “Advertising and Reality”. Complaint about the city did not go unnoticed. A scene repeated in the city making it a daily drama.
Mimo (Domenico) Calobristi knows Turin well, having arrived from Calabria at the age of eight with his family. In the early 1960s, his father moved with his family to the capital of Piedmont to work as a Fiat worker. Calobristi, an unearned degree in literature and philosophy, was one of the protagonists of the great season of Turin documentary filmmakers who spoke in the 1980s about the world of work, social contradictions, and political conflict of the period. Award-winning films at independent film festivals, such as Salsomaggiore, Turin and Bellaria films, then reached international ratings in Madrid, Stuttgart, Munich and Barcelona. Thirty-year-old Kalopresti, for the Audiovisual Archive of the Labor and Democracy Movement, created in 1985 “About Spavitator”, winner of the Turin Youth Film Festival. Before changing the genre, it was the direction of two documentaries about labor struggles in the war years: “1943 Choice” and “Interrupted Linearity and Freedom 1943-1945”. Precisely because of his commitment to telling the hard facts of Turin, the photo that Calobristi posted on social networks is of particular value. These words, taken from David Bracco’s “Cinema City of Turin” CD, sound the natural caption for that image: “I love this contrast: Turin is a hard city, a factory city, a city of things I love less than life. But it is also a city closely associated with it of A personal, humanistic and also professional point of view, because my work in cinema starts from Turin, from its cultural and political fermentation, from its festival, and from all the people who are with them.I have made short films, documentaries and initiatives, in a kind of perfect continuation of the so-called “militant cinema”, from Directed by political activists who independently made films as a political exercise, wandering in front of the factory, giving voice to the workers.Discussing in meetings the footage material.We the video makers, after years, have absorbed something out of this world and even if our businesses are very different, we started from the same idea: the possibility of actually interfere.”
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