 |
 |
A poster for Alessandro Piva's 'La Capa Gira' ('My Head is Spinning')
|
Despite his decidedly Anglo-Saxon name, fair skin and light brown hair, Edoardo Winspeare is a terrone, the term used for southern Italians with strong historical links to tilling the earth. The term is a pejorative one, but Winspeare sees nothing to be ashamed of in his southern roots. The director, who was born in Austria and studied film in Munich, feels really at home in only one place: Salento, an area south of Lecce in the heel of Italy, where he grew up. "It's Italy, but it's close to Africa," says Winspeare, 35. "There's a little bit of Greece, a little bit of the Middle East."
McDonald's may be taking Italy and the rest of Europe by storm, and English may be the lingua franca of the Internet, but the trend toward cultural homogenization runs into a couple of serious cinematic obstacles in Winspeare and fellow director Alessandro Piva. Both have recently made artistically and commercially successful films in southern dialects, with Italian subtitles. Winspeare and Piva have drawn audiences nationwide, even though the language in the films isn't known to most Italians.
Winspeare's latest film is Sangue Vivo (Life Blood), the story of Pino Zimba, a man who plays the tambourine in a band and sells fruits and vegetables when he's not trafficking in contraband cigarettes. Winspeare uses nonprofessional actors speaking Salentino, the local dialect, to create a convincing portrait of the rough life of criminality and smuggling common in the south of Italy. For Zimba, music is his life blood, what enables him to forget his family troubles and his debts to the mob. In many ways Salentino is the life blood of the film as well, giving it realism and grit. "I knew it would create problems, but I used dialect so it would be more natural," Winspeare says. "That's the way these people speak." The film, Winspeare's second full-length feature, opened to good reviews in Italy in June. Time Out Roma called it "one of the best Italian films of recent years."
Piva, 34, is another young director from the same region whose local dialect films are gaining commercial and critical success. Piva's first feature LaCapaGira (My Head is Spinning), shot in the local Barese dialect, deals with some of the same themes as Sangue Vivo: delinquents, drugs and destitution. Financed independently for about $75,000, low even by Italy's modest standards, the film received a wildly enthusiastic response from locals when it premiered. After being shown out of competition at the Berlin Film Festival, LaCapaGira won nationwide exposure and went on to gross half a million dollars, leading some to dub it the Blair Witch Project of the Bel Paese.
Piva didn't even try for state funding for the project because of the impenetrable Barese dialect and the need for subtitles. "This film had a market value of zero before it was made," says Piva. The co-producer decided early on to shop the script to an executive at state television powerhouse rai, and was met with exactly what the director had predicted. "He didn't even read the script when he heard it was a film in dialect," Piva recalls. "He laughed. Of course, he's not laughing now."
Piva thinks TV is one of the main culprits behind the erosion of dialect's use in popular culture. This point is driven home throughout the film, as in many scenes characters speak in Barese above the drone of game shows and soap operas. The jarring sounds underscore just how different a dialect can be from the Italian taught in school. "People actually speak a fairly different language from the one you hear on television," Piva notes. "When you want to express particularly strong feelings — from jokes to anger to bitterness — you almost always use dialect in Italy."
LaCapaGira's rave reviews and financial success in an industry saturated with big-budget American movies dubbed into Italian may be a sign that Italians are rediscovering what Piva calls "the real language of the streets." The script for LaCapaGira plays around the faultlines of this linguistic divide. At the beginning of the film a young man, speaking in Barese, tells his friend to turn left. The friend, distracted, asks, "Right?" The response is curt. "What do you mean right? Left! Can't you understand Italian?" The line drew laughs from Milan to Palermo.
|
|
|
|
New Heights
From virtual life in a Geneva lab via a bird's eye view of the Alps to a pavement perspective of old and new in Greece and Rome
Photo Gallery
Check out the photos from this leg of TIME's Fast Forward Europe voyage
Insect Power
Software that imitates the behaviour of ants could make highway and telecom traffic more efficient
Firm Foundation
Scarred by war and restoration, the Parthenon gets a facelift
Next Revolution
The Palais de Tokyo, site of Paris' first modern art museeum, will re-open to showcase young artists
Italy's Future
Will center-right media magnate and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi regain the title in the spring? He's up against Rome's Mayor Francesco Rutelli in the center-left corner
Speaking in Tongues
Films in local Italian dialects are a surprise box-office hit
Sky's the Limit
A sneak preview of Airbus' three-decker superjumbo with its casinos, shops and piano bars
Fascinated by Fire
Public spectacle designer Yves Pepin on the need for fireworks, fountains and mass celebrations
A Greek Sojourn
TIME's Paris bureau chief Thomas Sancton discovers the old and new Greece
Songs of the South
TIME explores the Italian-speaking Ticino region of southern Switzerland
City of the Future
Toulouse could well be a model of multi-culturalism
The City That Always Sleeps
A visit to Geneva's wild side
The Mouse That Roared
TIME travels to Andorra, one of Europe's smallest countries
The Eternal City
>A trip through the glory that is Rome
Pasta Bella
A visit to Barilla, pasta purveyors to the world
Top Gear
TIME test drives a Ferrari | Photos
A Second Life
TIME meets Hollywood star turned restaurateur Leslie Caron
My Dinner with Claude
TIME dines Claude Nobs, the founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival
Thinking Outside the Sandbox
Innovative teachers in northern Italy are integrating technology into classroom life
Mind Trails
Forget Al Gore: TIME Speaks with the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee
A Brief History of the Higgs Hunt
Scientists in Switzerland may have solved one of the great mysteries of particle physics. Why should we care?
People To Watch: Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann | Amélie Nothomb | Mirko Nesurini | Michel Meyer | Neil Barrett
|
