da “ Lidea documentaria – altri sguardi del cinema italiano- Marco Bertozzi- Editore Lindau

They say that a con science is truly necessary in order to understand reality. But what is it we can say we truly know?

Ideas have nothing to do with reality; the truth is something that has to be experienced directly, instant after instant.

In order for truth to assert itself everything must fade into the background: faith, knowledge, experience, ideology; one has to attain a form of “absence”.

The decision to make documentaries came out of the need to inform, to delve deeper into marginal and more tenuous aspects of reality, but without presenting them as a “hell”, as often happens in today’s journalism.

India was that different reality that has allowed me to lose myself, to understand that reality is like a mirror that hides other truths, that objectivity does not exist.

India teaches that reality is maya, illusion.

By becoming aware of limits, my limits and those of others, I discovered an amazing state of peace. The kind of peace that enables you to get close to the truth.

I had to rediscover this attitude when dealing with female sexual mutiliations in Africa, but it wasn’t easy.

How can one document this kind of torture? Pain inflicted by women on other women. Often men having any knowledge of it.

But it was the African women themselves that asked me to show everything, more pain, more horror, but I had to find a way of not judging and managing to listen. Trying not to standardize. Without manipulating.

But allowing my feelings to show through.

In each of my documentaries: on child labour and the eunuch community in India, on strippers in the industrial areas of nothern Italy, on sexual mutilations in Africa, on micro-credit in Bangladesh and finally the one about the foreigners living around Piazza Vittorio in Rome, I tried to play with the filmic language, which at times meant running the risk of going “beyond” what is normally defined as a documentary.

We often restrict ourselves to living in the past, in our memories, while awaiting the sensations that we expect from the future, but at times one perceives, at times only for a fleeting moment, that the “truth” is a land with no paths.