A man who never stops fighting even when everything is stripped from him. Marco Amenta portrays Antonio Gramsci far removed from history textbooks, more intimate and human, in "Odio gli indifferenti," the new documentary film funded by the Fondazione Sardegna Film Commission, which will premiere tonight at 9 pm at the Fabbrica del Cinema as part of the Carbonia Film Festival, running from today until Sunday under the artistic direction of Francesco Giai Via. On the centenary of the Sardinian thinker's arrest by the fascist regime, the 56-year-old director from Palermo retraces his life through hundreds of letters written during the prison sentence that would kill him in 1937, at the age of 46, just days after his formal release . The writings of the founder of the Communist Party reveal his tender relationship with his wife Julca, memories of his childhood in Ghilarza, and his love for his mother Giuseppina Marcias and his sons, Delio and Giuliano, with the latter he would never know.
Marco Amenta, why talk about Antonio Gramsci today?
I've always worked on figures who fight oppression in its various forms, and Gramsci is the Jungian archetype of the warrior who never stops. Today, when he seems less present in the collective memory, especially among young people, I believe he should be rediscovered, even in schools.
He chose to do so starting from his personal story.
It's the most natural way to immediately identify with him. Imagine being separated from your wife and children for over ten years, cut off from political life. That was precisely the regime's goal: as Michele Isgrò, the fascist prosecutor who convicted him, said, they had to make sure that brain wouldn't function for twenty years.
What struck you most when reading the letters?
"Her constant effort to resist self-pity. Even in those conditions, when her already fragile health was further weakening, she refused to let it overwhelm her. One of the most moving aspects are the letters to her children, for whom she invented fairy tales and stories."
