Giorgio Diritti
L'uomo che verrà

Set after September 8, during the German occupation in Italian territories during the Republic of Salò, The Man Who Will Come is inspired by the massacre of Monte Sole, one of the most tragic and unspeakable pages in Italian history. Hundreds of men, women, elderly, and children were rounded up and slaughtered by the Nazi-fascists, a few months before the Liberation.

Diritti's film does not aim to recount the event in a documentary style, it follows the events with harsh but necessary realism, while at the same time resorting to a cinematic and narrative filter, in a sense akin to a fairy tale, by staging fictional characters representing a typical peasant family from the Bolognese Apennines, on which this work is based.

From a cinematic and poetic point of view, the film is undoubtedly a child of Olmi and a masterpiece like The Tree of Wooden Clogs. Also in this case, for instance, the local dialect is used, in which almost all the dialogues are shot, with rare concessions to Italian and, of course, the German used by the SS soldiers. And, like in Olmi's work, also in Diritti's, the daily reality of this rural community, one like many others in deep Italy, is reconstructed and portrayed in images with great poetry, beauty, and humanity, over the course of a year. And here, too, the great sacredness of the Earth and the roots is restored.

The life of the villagers continues, even in the midst of a bloody and endured war, and in this the Italian soul emerges in a touching manner as much as in the Palme d'Or-winning film set in the early 1900s in the Bassa Bergamasca. Little and nothing substantial, in fact, had changed over those forty years and beyond, in certain realities still extremely far, in time and space, from modernity.

From a historical and civil perspective, however, The Man Who Will Come is a child of the Resistance, but, and this is another of the film's great merits, the partisans are not portrayed in a rhetorical or idealized manner, but rather, in turn, as ordinary individuals, with their own strengths and weaknesses, who could do nothing to prevent those massacres.

The Man Who Will Come is a tough film, an intense experience that, although without any Hollywood-style spectacle, does not spare or soften anything, restoring dignity to the dead, the cruelty of the tormentors, but above all, the air of great cinema is palpable at every moment of the viewing.

An unquestionably painful viewing, but in this case, it is not wrong to talk about a necessary film, because this page of history is known and remembered by few today.

And because the film is another evocation of our history, of a past that does not stop looking at us, a staging of what we were and, at bottom, still are. So far, so near, of whom we are children and grandchildren.

Those who wish to watch it can find it on Prime Video.