After a year of work marked by visits to public film archives, private foundations, and encounters with key witnesses of Italian cinema, this coming September Careof presents to the public the premiere of the film Diranno che li ho uccisi io by Danilo Correale, within a solo exhibition that accompanies the screening with sculptural elements, an artist's publication, and previously unseen documents related to the research process that led the artist to the creation of the work.

The film is the result of an in-depth investigation into Italian cinema from the 1950s to the 1980s that, for various reasons, remained boxed away in archive folders as screenplays or in the minds of directors as mere ideas, never becoming films due to censorship.

From the birth of the Republic in 1946 to the political hegemony of the Democrazia Cristiana, Italian cinema suffered a kind of intermittent castration. This happened for political, religious, moral, social, and often economic reasons, forcing even the most prestigious auteurs to make stylistic and content-related compromises to avoid violating the censorship laws which, though amended and revised, have been in force since 1962 and remain so to this day.

Diranno che li ho uccisi io is a film that attempts to reconstruct fragments of this forgotten cinema through an immersive play of lights, shadows, and camera movements. Among the various scripts unearthed in the course of Correale’s research and readings that fueled his desire and inquiry, themes and taboos such as European colonialism, feminism, armed struggle, resistance, class difference, and religion emerge—along with various cinematic styles that inspired the making of this film.

This film connects, ideally and evocatively, six screenplays—along with six film genres and six underrepresented topics—from the fall of Fascism to the rise of private television in Italy.

“In the period leading up to production, opposing feelings alternated, moments of euphoria and despair to which only an act of resistance against an increasingly uninhabitable political present could give meaning. Hence, the need to construct a counter-narrative of a small great story: not only that of cinema and its contribution to Italian mass culture, from post-Fascism to 1984, but also that of a collective cultural history that urgently needs to be deconstructed and rewritten,” writes Danilo Correale in the director’s notes accompanying the publication.

Diranno che li ho uccisi io was made possible thanks to the valuable collaboration of many public and private entities, institutional partners, and individuals to whom we extend our sincere gratitude.

The work by Danilo Correale has become part of the public collection of MART Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto and will also be presented in 2019 at the exhibition space of the Museo MAC in Belfast, a project partner.

A special screening of the film will be presented at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, New York, on November 17, 2018.

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