The film Né ombra né luce at the Filmmaker Festival
Made with the contribution of IULM and the Department of Communication, Arts and Media "Giampaolo Fabris," the documentary will be screened in the Out of Competition section of the Filmmaker Festival on November 24 at 5 p.m. at Cinema Arlecchino.
The documentary Né ombra né luce (Neither shadow nor light), made by Andrea Caccia with students from the Galilei-Luxemburg High School in Milan, tells the story of the Marchiondi-Spagliardi Institute, which took in so-called "difficult" boys and girls, assuming the mission of offering them a home and a path of education, training and inclusion. Designed in 1954 by Vittoriano Viganò, and directed by Dr. Angelo Donelli, a neuropsychiatrist who had envisioned a program of integration-and not correction-for boys with psychosocial hardships, the Marchiondi is a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture now in a state of almost total abandonment and neglect, the gigantic and material remnant of a long process of abandonment, administrative conflicts, and bureaucratic alternations and disputes. Né ombra né luce recounts, through archival materials and the testimonies of those who have lived there since the 1950s, the materialization and disintegration of a monumental container of utopias.
IULM supported, as a partner, the National Cinema Plan for Schools project "Education and Memory. A Suburban Tale"-funded by the Ministry of Education and Merit and the Ministry of Culture-of which the film is a continuation.
A number of students from the Master's Degree Program in Television, Film and New Media had participated in the original project for the writing and archival research phases.
The Department of Communication, Arts and Media "Giampaolo Fabris" also contributed to the making of the film.
Among the faculty members from our University who worked on the film, in addition to director Andrea Caccia, is cinematographer Massimo Schiavon. Two graduates of the Master's Degree Program in Television, Film and New Media, Filippo Tentori and Paolo La Naia, did the editing and graphics for the film, respectively.
Far from any attempt at monumentalization or museification of the Marchiondi and what it represented, Né ombra né luce is a documentary that confronts oblivion and memory, the successes and failures behind an educational project, and the complexity of relationships with the other, in order to tell, through the events related to a Milanese building, a piece of twentieth-century Italian history.
The documentary will be screened in the Out of Competition section of the Filmmaker Festival on November 24 at 5 p.m. at Cinema Arlecchino.