Giovanni Piperno / Italy / 2023 / 65’/ Italian

Freely browsing through the images produced for the PCI between the 1950s and 1980s by great Italian filmmakers and meeting the gaze of Luciana Castellina, a historic communist leader and founder of the «Manifesto», never orthodox and still an indefatigable political animator, Giovanni Piperno’s account asks what was that “party-giraffe,” as Togliatti once called it, strange yet real. The film investigates what remains today of the experience that involved millions of people in an attempt to transform themselves and the world. In the journey, the sense of a politics made up of commitment, solidarity, confrontation and an ideality still capable of making many hearts beat today resurfaces.
As well as on the meaning of politics in people’s lives, 16 millimeter to revolution is also an example of historiography in images, rediscovering the cinema of that political generation and a free, experimental, bottom-up, empathetic, militant way of making films. As Zavattini says in the film, «a cinema of many for many».

with Luciana Castellina
an idea of Giovanni Piperno, Luca Ricciardi
Screenplay Alessandro Aniballi, Giovanni Piperno
Editing Paolo Petrucci
Live sound Fabio Santesarti, Niccolò Bosio
Original music Valerio Vigliar
Sound design and mix Riccardo Spagnol
Production Audiovisual Archive of the Democratic and Labour Movement ETS
Producer Luca Ricciardi
Archives Audiovisual Archive of the Democratic and Labour Movement ETS, Rai Teche

Giovanni Piperno
Giovanni Piperno has directed numerous documentaries including, Un thè sul set (co-directed with Laura Muscardin) at the Venice Film Festival in 1995, Interview to my mother on air at Rai 3, Mario’s film also broadcast by ARTE (both together with Agostino Ferrente) and L’esplosione winner of the Turin Film Festival 2003 and candidate for the David di Donatello 2004. CIMAP! centoitalianimattiapechino, participated in the 2008 Locarno Film Festival and won the 2009 Libero Bizzarri Prize. The film about the Agnelli family, The missing piece, after participation at the 2010 Torino Film Festival, was released in theaters in 2011 and aired on Rai 1. Le cose belle, co-directed with Agostino Ferrente, participated in the 2012 Venice Film Festival, won twenty-five awards and was released in Italian theaters in 2014. With the collective film 9×10 novanta he participated in the 2014 Venice Film Festival. At the 2015 Rome Film Festival, in the “Alice in the City” section, he presented the short film Quasi Eroi which won the Silver Ribbon as the best short film of 2016. Since 2017 he has been director of the Perugia Social Film Festival, and since 2020 he has taught documentary direction at the Gian Maria Volonté School. His latest work Cipria was presented at the XL Torino Film Festival and was successfully released in Italian theaters in March 2023.