Davide Ferrario
La strada di Levi

LA RECENSIONE

Like a journey back in time, this beautiful documentary by Davide Ferrario and Marco Belpoliti is dedicated to the return journey of Primo Levi, from Auschwitz to home, in Turin, which lasted almost ten months and was immortalized by him in The Truce.

Thus, images of Eastern European countries emerge, but not only those, far yet so close to us, immersed in a substrate still so fertile with deep union between men and lands, ancient distant feelings that serve as a backdrop to a continuous evocation of pathos and Heimat, primordiality and nature, long and flat stretches of interchangeable plains, battered by winds and snow and birches and conifers, faces worn, furrowed by the vicissitudes of a life never tender, far from the comforts and splendors of this partial and flawed world of ours where rails carry trains with men returning home but heading in the opposite direction of where it lies.

And so small towns and remote stations of forgotten places are revisited, still far today from modernity, where a director and a writer retrace the tracks of a man, a chemist by profession, who always felt inadequate to this earthly appearance that he voluntarily ended at the bottom of a stairwell in 1987, liberated, yes, but as if forever imprisoned within himself. And at a time when everything repeats itself at more or less long and regular intervals, this film, wonderfully narrated by Umberto Orsini, helps us understand, almost twenty years later, that nothing repeats by chance and certain things bind and unbind even beyond our will, and that "The world seems to advance towards some ruin and we merely hope that the advance is slow."