Streaming on SBS On Demand - Barrie Pattison recommends ASPROMONTE: LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN (Mimmo Calopresti, Italy, 2019)

 

The plot involving educated protagonists transplanted into a remote community, which they come to value, keeps on turning up in films made by people almost certainly unaware of one another. This appears to be a pretty much world wide experience. People I knew went through it working in New Guinea. Missionary movies like Vessel of Wrath and The Sins of Rachel Cade are wide of the mark. There are high end variations like Dances With Wolves and we've just had Patricia Font's exceptional Spanish El maestro que prometió el mar /The Teacher Who Promised the Sea. You can point to the 1986 Chinese Qing chun ji/Sacrificed Youth or a flock of these made by the Italians, notably Pietro Germi's In nomme della legge/ In the Name of the Law and the Francesco Rosi Cristo si è fermato a Eboli / Christ Stopped at Eboli.

In this line, we get Mimmo Calopresti's five year old Aspromonte - La terra degli ultimi / Aspromonte: Land of the Forgotten which has surfaced here on SBS and is now streaming on SBS On Demand, presumably because the producers couldn't get any better offers. That is a pity as the film turns out to be one of the most impressive currently circulating.

It kicks off in 1951 with the Africo village mob swarming into the Calabrian Prefect's office. In response to their "Volio un medico" chant demanding the facilities their remote settlement lacks, he signs an undertaking that they will be provided a resident doctor. Our protagonist however, as with Enric Auquer in The Teacher Who Promised the Sea, is a new school ma'am. Struggling up the donkey track comes the film's most familiar face, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (above) similarly finding a derelict classroom and the kids again off working in the fields. The village has had city teachers before but they didn't last. However, this one is a volunteer. She isn't got up glamorous, though local alpha male ex-African campaign soldier Francesco Colella tells her she's beautiful and steals a kiss.

A death, in an unattended childbirth, firms up the locals' resolve. They get stuck into constructing a road to their isolated home. At this point, the film starts out-guessing us. Local Don, the great Sergio Rubini (La caso Moro, La Bionda) no less, is scornful of their efforts telling them that their children will use the access to leave and forget how to speak Italian. He kills Colella's pigs to demonstrate his dominance. Colella's young son can't understand how this one man can assert himself alone – the way Rubini did when he took away the boy's mother. "They treat him like a leader because they have no one else."

This is only one of the film's complexities. The local priest supports the villagers but we see him just once joining the demonstration that gets an arrested local turned loose. Carabinieri, who are shown as ineffectual agents of the power structure, prove resourceful and sympathetic. The film's 'Scope frame photography is admirable. Cameramen Stefano Falivene's striking oceanfront scenics show how beautiful the Calabrian Coast is.  But the future is finally in leaving for the outside world Valeria demonstrates on her battered globe. The kids search for Australia, a place of some fascination because relatives have already gone there. Rubini is scornful. "When you lose the land, you lose everything." Their circus dance adds a glimpse of tradition. The use of location and the immaculate outfits of the officials contrasting with the grubby clothes of the villagers is already a comment.  

Finally, shots are exchanged. "When I killed in the war, no one said it was murder." Hope is lost. 

We get a flood destruction ending, curiously repeating Sacrificed Youth and, again resembling The Teacher Who Promised the Sea, we have a coda with the son now an old man.

This is the first film by writer-director Calopresti that I've seen since his intriguing 1995 La seconda volta which featured Bruni Tedeschi opposite Nanni Moretti. It's possible that some of his twenty odd intervening movies had screenings here but I haven't been able to catch them. I'd certainly be more interested in those than I am in our stream of Francois Ozon or Pedro Almodovar releases or festival favorites from Pedro Costa and Lav Diaz. It's another demonstration of how, without a Cinémathèque, the local movie scene has gone to seed – not that we needed another demonstration.