Faberfilm

BABEL BLU
a documentary project by Renato Rinaldi


Friuli, deep North. Land of hard work and stormy weather. It’s part of Italy even though about 600,000 people speak a different language and some of them fly a different flag. ‘A Nation without a State’: an opinion shared by many in this region, that is why Patriarch Bertram of St Genesius’s flag has been chosen as the Nation’s symbol. For a community struggling to hold on to its identity a flag that has remained unchanged over the centuries seems to be the only element able to counteract the corrosion of diversity.
The film is a poetic vision of such protective endeavor, following the stories of people, who in their daily lives stage their own resistance against the unavoidable: homogenization. Sometime it is a solitary fight that affects deeply the humanity of the people involved, loading up the struggle with universality, therefore transcending the limits of a community. Love, dignity, solitude, neurosis, self-rule, that is what these people talk about, and they do it in a contradictory as well as fascinating way, in the shadow of a flag. This isn’t an apology of localism, it’s just a way to listen to a peripheral voice, too often ignored, in the attempt to understand where these drifts and tensions are taking us in a European context where the fascination for small homelands is coming to surface more and more.

with the support of
Fondo per l’Audiovisivo Friuli Venezia Giulia
ARLeF – Agjenzie regional per lenghe furlane