Enrico Berlinguer forty years after his death

The occasion is the 40th anniversary of the death of Enrico Berlinguer. We are in June 1984, on the evening of the 7th the illness at the rally in Padua, the stroke, the coma, the death. The date is June 11, two days after the funeral in Rome. Two films tell the last days and the funeral of the PCI leader, but above all they tell of his political humanity.

The choice is to start from the last greeting which is not intended to be a farewell and in fact becomes in the title Goodbye Berlinguer. In theaters for three days 10, 11 and 12 June with IWanted, the documentary, directed by Michele Mellara and Alessandro Rossi, starts from the funeral of the PCI leader, based on film materials from the Audiovisual Archive of the Workers’ and Democratic Movement and on those of the collective film The farewell to Enrico Berlinguer shot by around forty great authors of Italian cinema to pay homage to the historic secretary of the party. Among others, the names include Bernardo and Giuseppe Bertolucci, Roberto Benigni, Carlo Lizzani, Giuliano Montaldo, Ettore Scola and Gillo Pontecorvo.

«We drew from that film, making the images dialogue with other materials coming from the archive of the workers’ movement in which we selected Berlinguer, alive and well, fighting with us», explain the directors. This can be seen both in an intimate and private dimension when he talks about his first Communist Party membership in Sardinia, and in international national rallies. «This can be seen in his close and strong relationship with the militants and also in some choices on national politics such as the one against the referendum for the abolition of divorce». There is the huge crowd at the funeral, people who recognize themselves in him. This is an emotional film by will and choice of the authors, a film that they define as a concert born together with the music of Massimo Zamboni of CCCP. «We worked on the one hand on the construction of the image on a rhythmic scan of the montage within which we kept the spaces available for the music, as if it were a visual score».

Everything is part of a symphonic movement that led the authors to rediscover Enrico Berlinguer. «Even though we already knew it, what amazed us was his ability to communicate with every social stratum, at every latitude, millions of people who recognized themselves in him. Working on history serves to deal with the present.”

Before the end. The last days of Enrico Berlinguer by Samuele Rossi it premieres on Tuesday 11 June in competition at the Biografilm Festival 2024 and will be in theaters from 13 June. This film begins and ends on the smile of Enrico Berlinguer, this is also a film made entirely with archive material, largely unreleased video and audio on the last days of Enrico Berlinguer’s life 40 years after his death. An emotional story constructed using only repertoire, the result of three years of research, to offer an unprecedented perspective on the last moments of the PCI secretary’s life. He who concluded the speech despite the illness on June 7th. Four days in dramatic conditions and death. the President of the Republic, Sandro Pertini, rushed to his bedside and managed to enter the room to see him and kiss him on the forehead shortly before his death. A few hours after Berlinguer’s death, Pertini forced himself to transport the body on the presidential plane, a unique event in the history of the Republic. “I take him away like a brotherly friend, like a son, like a fighting companion.”

There are the news, the newspaper headlines, the funeral, the medical bulletins, the memories of the militants, the presence of party comrades and opponents. There is the story of the funeral home and the funeral in Piazza San Giovanni: foreign leaders, the presence of Giorgio Almirante leader of the Social Movement. This documentary collects speeches that are relevant to women, schools and welfare.

The director explains: «A point of arrival, a showdown, a dutiful, necessary, personal gesture, which recovers the dialogue with a story that I have not experienced directly and yet which I have, since I was a child, felt first-hand through the stories of my grandparents, of that community of affections and values, within which I grew up and which formed me. A story that I wanted to make my own, that I wanted to give back to my generation and future onesthat in some way it could be experienced and known again.”

The film covers seven days. «Those seven days that I feel have somehow traced a furrow between a before and an after, between a clear time and a confused time. Because, in this nebulous present, those days, that history, those emotions seem to me to be a trace capable of indicating a possible direction, a possible recomposition of a meaning, of an idea of ​​the country, of a memory that becomes collective and not only private. This is why I immediately believed that the film should be made exclusively with archive material, even though this choice involved years of work that I didn’t know where it would take me. I could have followed a more conventional path, more “readable” in the eyes of broadcasters and players, but the intention has always been to take a decisive step towards a new phase of my path, more in line with what I felt was right and necessary to bring the story I wanted to see to the screen and deliver to the audience. No comments, no posthumous readings, just an accurate and renewed narrative reconstruction of those days.”