LUBO
Venice 80 – Competition
Italy/Switzerland, 2023 Director Giorgio Diritti With Franz Rogowski, Christophe Sermet, Valentina Bellè, Noemi Besedes, Cecilia Steiner, Joel Basman Running time 181′
The last of the six Italian films in competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival marks the return of Giorgio Diritti after he attended the Berlinale in 2020 with the feature film about painter Antonio Ligabue Volevo nascondermi (Silver Bear for Elio Germano’s performance, Silver Ribbon of the Year and seven David di Donatello awards, including film and director) and on the Lido with the short Zombie. Singer of rural communities and marginalized characters (the focus of his revelatory debut feature, Il vento fa il suo giro, 2005), this time the award-winning filmmaker competes for the Golden Lion with Lubo, inspired by Mario Cavatore’s novel Il seminatore. When he read the book, Diritti explains, “revealed to me little-known events that happened in Switzerland for fifty years, leading me to reflect on the sense of justice, institutions, the meaning of educating and loving.” The result is a film from which “emerges how insane principles and discriminatory laws generate an evil that spreads like an oil stain over time, penetrating the lives of men, changing their paths, their values, generating pain, anger, violence, ambiguity … but also a love for life and for one’s children that wants to survive everything and bring back justice.” Indeed, at the centre, we have the title character (played by Franz Rogowski of Freaks Out and Disco Boy), a nomadic street performer who, in 1939, after being called up to the ranks of the Swiss army to defend the borders from a possible German invasion, discovers that his wife has died trying to prevent law enforcement from taking away the couple’s three young children, taken from the family in deference to the Swiss government’s national re-education program aimed at eradicating Jenisch culture. For Lubo, it is the beginning of an odyssey to search for his children and to reassert the dignity of so many like him. Diritti returns to recount the abuses and wounds of History, as he did for one of his best-known and most appreciated titles, L’uomo che verrà (2009), a re-enactment of the massacre of Monte Sole (aka Marzabotto) carried out by the Nazi-Fascists in 1944 against the civilian population of the Apennines of Emilia. The film, shot in the local dialect with Italian subtitles, won two awards at the Rome International Film Festival, as well as three David di Donatello awards (including best feature film) and three Nastri d’argento in 2010.
