A lost world “revives” on the screen in seven extraordinary documentaries. De Seta’s films combine the strength of classical cinema with an austere and powerful expressiveness, thanks to which the documentary Isole di Fuoco, set in the volcanic and stormy Eolie islands, was awarded the First Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955. A world where the ritual dimension is very strong, like in Lu Tempu di li pisci spata, on swordfish fishing “in the tepid water separating Sicily and Calabria”, a prey identified by the sailors on boat masts after a long wait. Hunt frenzy, worthy of Moby Dick, and the struggle between man and nature are also present in Contadini del mare, dedicated to fishing with the tunny-fishing nets off the Sicilian coast, where men wait for tunas, which have always followed the same route: “When sea tribute appears in the net, the circle of life and death repeats”. And, at sunset, when men go back ashore and children dance, solemn women carry the fishes on their head to the fish market (Pescherecci is on the same topic). The conditions of miners risking their lives in the bowels of the earth to extract sulphur (Surfarara) or the conditions of farm labourers scything and harvesting wheat in huge fields with primitive systems in Parabola d’oro are not less dramatic. Then, Pasqua in Sicilia with its sacred folklore and the representation of the Passion of Christ. De Seta’s perspective is interested and at the same time poetic: it reveals the naked truth of hard work, pauses, holidays and mourning. Once upon a time there was the South, and it was precisely like that.

Vittorio De Seta

Born in Palermo in 1923 from an aristocratic family, he says that he “discovered” the world of the humble during military service. He devotes most of his cinematographic work, undertaken after quitting the faculty of architecture, to them. A withdrawn and shy author, for a long time underestimated by critics, he was often personally involved in film editing, photography and musical choices. After his Sicilian documentaries, in 1958 he shoots Pastori ad Orgosolo and Un giorno in Barbagia in Sardinia, which are at the basis of his feature film Banditi ad Orgosolo (1961, Prize for the First Work at Venice Film Festival), a detailed in-depth analysis of an archaic civilization and its malaise. In 1966 he directs Un uomo a metàon the eccentricity of a politically-committed intellectual, giving rise to a lot of criticism (Moravia and Pasolini among the few defending him). After L’invitata (1969), he meets a resounding success in 1973 with the TV series Diario di un maestro. In 1981 he leaves cinema, but he is back in 1993 with the direction of In Calabria, in which he reflects again on the lost identity of the South of Italy. In 2004 he completes Lettere dal Sahara on an African migrant in Italy.