AA.VV.
All The Invisible Children

Invisible children...right under everyone's eyes.

At the 62nd Venice Film Festival in 2006, this film "All the Invisible Children" was presented out of competition, created by a group of more or less famous directors (from Spike Lee to Katia Lund) united by this awareness project on the problem of abandoned childhood, without distinction of race, religion, or culture.
Therefore, a "choral" film, supported by Unicef, PAM, and the UN, made up of 7 episodes each signed by a different director, tackled using different narrative keys and the appropriate style of the involved director.

• Medhi Charef with his "Tanza" talks to us about an African child guerrilla, torn between his desire to play and the harsh reality of a war that is neither wanted nor understood.
• Emir Kusturica with "Blue Gypsy" tells us the prison odyssey of a Romani child who, after release and facing a hostile and cruel world, deliberately decides to return to prison, now more familiar and humane than the external society.
• Spike Lee with the distressing "Jesus Children of America" (perhaps the best of the seven!) tackles the delicate theme of school discrimination of a girl who, by chance, discovers she's the child of two drug-addicted parents who have transmitted AIDS to her.
• Katia Lund, in the short "Bilù & Joao" tells us about 24 hours in the life of two children from São Paulo, Brazil, searching for cardboard and cans to earn a few bucks in a city of degradation and violence.
• The Scott brothers (one is the famous Ridley!) together direct the heartbreaking "Jonathan", the story of a photojournalist who returns to memories of his troubled childhood (vaguely reminiscent of Bergmann's Wild Strawberries).
• The compatriot Stefano Veneruso signs the sixth episode (perhaps the weakest) narrating in "Ciro" the misdeeds of a Neapolitan street kid dealing with a degraded and hostile Naples.
• John Woo, in the film "Song song a little cat" tells in a cross-parallelism the two lives of the young orphan Little Cat and the rich but sad and sorrowful Song Song.

A film, therefore, fragmented, with considerable ups and downs, that attempts to depict common discomforts, small and large stories that cinema hardly ever manages to tell with realism and a kind of poetry that touches deep cords of sensitivity, which we all too often tend to forget. A film at times bitter (Spike Lee's episode is unapologetically harsh), at times funny (certain scenes from Kusturica's film are truly amusing) and at times almost documentary-like (Katia Lund's film seems almost shot in real-time due to the naturalness of the two convincing young performers), with the main song of the project "Teach me again", written and produced by our Elisa and performed by Tina Turner and Elisa herself.

Technically very varied, it results in a bleak but sincere picture depicting a childhood in some ways without a future but which contains a faint hope (like the groundbreaking gesture of Tanza in the first episode, who falls asleep in the classroom where he has just placed a time bomb) in the spontaneous ability of these children to seek a broader and truer sense of justice and community than that imposed by adults.

A film that perhaps won't move the collective sensitivity of the viewers even a little bit, but an essential film that needed to be made, if only to remind us once again that, beyond the easy rhetoric, whether we like it or not, we were all children.
And a child who has had a happy childhood will be a better man for himself and the society that adopts him tomorrow. It goes without saying that if the society we live in does not satisfy us and seems unjust and cruel, the blame also falls on the tormented and unjust childhood that many, too many of us adults, have suffered in the past and have not been able to overcome in the best way.

There remains the question: is this a society shaped on the needs of the littlest ones? Who takes care of the psycho-physical development of the small men of tomorrow? Is this task solely on the family, or should it fall more heavily on a society that truly wants to be called civilized? What can be done to raise children (and therefore young people who will become adults) balanced, psychologically in harmony with themselves, and prepared for the harsh world around them?

I leave to you the answers or analysis to these questions that the film does not directly ask but leaves many doors ajar that should be gently and humanely opened in these cases.