30. Film Festival della Lessinia
Bosco Chiesanuova (Italia)
23 August - 1 September 2024

According to the project by David Maria Turoldo, Gli Ultimi should have been the first of a never completed trilogy of films set in Friuli, starring the farmers of those lands. Inspired by the story of Turoldo, Io non ero un fanciullo, the film recalls the native land, the figure of the mother, misery lived with dignity: these are some of the themes that emerge from the story of Checo, a shepherd boy, the son of tenant farmers in the countryside of Friuli in the Thirties. Despite his intelligence and sensitivity, Checo is mocked by his companions who have scornfully nicknamed him Scarecrow. His will be a story of awareness, emancipation and redemption. Of Gli ultimi, Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote that it is "dictated by frank and high poetry", while Pier Paolo Pasolini described it as "full of an exasperated coherence with its own stylistic assumption, and therefore profoundly poetic". A tribute to the "peasant world", thirty years after the death of David Maria Turoldo, creator and co-scriptwriter of the film, and twenty years after the restoration of the film in 2002 by the Cineteca del Friuli which granted the Film Festival della Lessinia the work in its full version.

Photographer: Elio Ciol, Image source: Cineteca del Friuli.

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  Vito Pandolfi

  A director and theatre critic, he graduated in directing from the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica Silvio D’Amico. In 1964 he founded the Teatro Stabile di Roma. He has countless studies dedicated to Italian theatre and his direction of shows in which he worked, among others, with the actors Luigi Squarzina and Vasco Pratolini and collaborated with Carlo Emilio Gadda. In 1962 he wrote, with David Maria Turoldo, and directed his only feature film, The Last.