Touching the wall

Touching the wall (Sfiorando il muro)

original title:

Sfiorando il muro

cast:

Guido Petter, Raul Franceschi, Antonio Romito, Pietro Calogero, Stefania Paternò, Silvia Giralucci

screenplay:

cinematography:

Daniele Gastoldi, Marco Tassinari

editing:

production:

distribution:

country:

Italy

year:

2012

film run:

51'

format:

colour

status:

Ready (26/07/2012)

festivals & awards:

The first communion and the blitz of 7 April. Games with friends and the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. Sfiorando il muro is a film about the 1970s from an unusual viewpoint: a woman who was a girl at the time emotionally recalls the demonstrations and graffiti. There is a reason: the filmmaker’s father, Graziano Giralucci, was killed by the Brigate Rosse together with Giuseppe Mazzola in 1974 in the MSI headquarters in Padua. They were the terrorist group’s first victims. To understand how it was possible to accept and consider inevitable political violence, the filmmaker searches out those who perpetrated it, those subjected to it and those who fought it—from the autonomi political group to the Fronte della Gioventù, from the magistrate Pietro Calogero, who ordered the blitz on 7 April against Toni Negri, to Guido Petter, a university lecturer and ex partisan beaten about the head with a hammer, and finally to the union leader who became a “grass” and was forced to hide for years just for having told the authorities everything he remembered about his time as a militant in Potere Operaio union. This journey between different and at times irreconcilable points of view also becomes a way for Silvia Giralucci to reconcile herself to the painful memory of her father, viewed as a martyr and symbol by his political community, a victim long considered guilty merely for being rightwing, a father present only in her dreams.