Claudio Lazzaro
Nazirock

"History teaches us that men and nations behave more wisely once they have exhausted all alternatives." (Abba Eban)

"The deported Jews? I didn't know. The Holocaust? Yeah, okay, but it wasn't six million... maybe one at most. Who told me? I read it on a site... now I don't remember..." (An interviewee from the far right)

My motto has always been: never back down in front of anything. And sometimes, in front of things we don't understand or that even horrify us... we can make the effort to "force ourselves" and delve into those things to try to understand the reasons of the other or of what "I cannot comprehend."

This film/documentary "Nazirock" by Claudio Lanzaro is a journey (I would also call it a "nightmare") into the Italian far-right movements. A documentary made in times not yet suspicious, where the first signs of the legitimization of a certain right-wing culture (what an oxymoron!) could already be detected, which then gave birth to the current social state of this Country: sexist, homophobic, aggressive, indifferent, selfish, and interventionist.

In a word, "far-right."

The film's narrative pretext is an extremist band that plays "right-wing punk," inciting hatred towards the different, the Jew, with lyrics filled with violence beyond any logic that adopts Hitler, Mussolini, death, and other icons in its collective imagery, including flags, t-shirts, soap bars (!) and macabre gadgets of choice...

A band that will play at the big gathering on December 2, 2006 (against Prodi!) held in Viterbo and organized by Forza Nuova. Among the various participants alternating on stage (strictly documented) the leader of the movement Roberto Fiore (convicted for subversive association), Luigi Ciavardini (arrested shortly after for robbery), Andrea Insabato (convicted for the attack on the Il Manifesto headquarters), Luca Romagnoli (who continues to deny the existence of gas chambers in Nazi extermination camps) and other equally untrustworthy characters... each with their own recipes, each with their own ravings against the System and Italy itself.

The most unsettling thing is to watch powerlessly the live-captured interviews, among the movement's supporters: desperate, shocked, often wasted youths, people with a cultural level of zero, incapable of articulating even the smallest reasoning. People angry with everyone and everything, full of hatred towards the whole world, people manipulated and "used" for political and ideological purposes (if one can even call it ideology). People we could all do without.

A profoundly bleak and apocalyptic film, which weighs down with infinite sadness and an unsettling feeling that's hard to endure for the 75 minutes of the film.

And indeed, I couldn't even last 60 minutes and abandoned the endeavor before its end.

Being informed about everything, okay. But harming oneself and degrading oneself in front of hundreds of zombies with no art nor part... this is really too much even for me.