In March 2020, the city walls of Bergamo enclosed a sick body: a complex whole of cells, tissue and organs that no longer communicate. The streets are empty, conversational exchanges have ceased, in-person meetings forbidden. Disconnected from all others, each body is alone within the walls.
That body is an organism that, despite the devastation, tries to react. Doctors, nurses, patients, volunteers, even those unaffected directly by the pain wrought by the sickness, looking to contribute to the process of collective healing. The recording and telling of the stories of those who have passed becomes a way to process private and collective grief and consider the need for a new rituality for death.
Stefano Savona’s documentary Le mura di Bergamo, about the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, and specifically the Lombard city’s experience of the virus, will have its international premiere screening in competition in the Encounters section of the 73° Berlin Film Festival.
Made in cooperation with Danny Biancardi, Sebastiano Caceffo, Alessandro Drudi, Silvia Miola, Virginia Nardelli, Benedetta Valabrega, Marta Violante, Le mura di Bergamo was also selected from 20 documentaries – chosen from the Competition, Berlinale Special, Encounters, Panorama, Forum, Generation and Perspektive Deutsches Kino sections – for the short list for the Berlinale Documentary Award, to be awarded during the official ceremony at the Berlinale Palast on 25 February 2023.
The film is a ILBE – Iervolino & Lady Bacardi Entertainment production with Rai Cinema.
The star of this story is the city, a social body that, like every living organism, is created as a sum of the infinite connections between its parts. The words, glances, gestures, silences recorded in this film are an attempt to bear witness to some of these connections with the hope that by making them visible the story being told will help in their consolidation.
“Three years ago, I travelled across a deserted Italy with a group of young directors who had been my students at the CSC Palermo, arriving in Bergamo in the midst of an unprecedented crisis – says the director. We tiptoed in to start filming the lives of those who, risking everything on the front line, were trying to tackle the catastrophe overwhelming us all. We hoped to recount the movements of a community that was fighting back. Every evening we would gather to watch the images that we had shot, trying to find the invisible links that joined them, to start to knit together the threads of the stories that the pandemic was trying to cancel. We returned to Bergamo for two more years to recount the collective ritual of processing grief and memory building that we witnessed begin and that this film-memorial wants to enshrine.”