Anna Lajolo

The struggle for housing in Rome, in the area of Magliana. Self-organization is opposed to the mediation of political parties, especially the Communist Party, and emerges as the only way for the emancipation and re-appropriation by the exploited.

italian documentary

Some persons bring chickens and fishes as presents to some actors who are playing, while the Warrior tries the mirror's suicide, but fails in seeing the Death. Outside, chewing-gums are distributed away and the Spring passes by, turning into a little girl. –G. L.

Video images shot on the ferry with which filmmakers Anna Lajolo and Guido Lombardi travelled to the island of Tristan da Cuhna, the subject of a documentary shot in 1992 for the Italian public television channel RAI.

Experimental short by Anna Lajolo and Guido Lombardi.

Experimental short.

Images, abstract forms of light, created manually, leading to the macro world of plants, trees and earth. The real African drums and John Coltrane's Ascension make up the accompaniment along with the words of an old farmer, a fruit grower, about the grandeur of nature, about its small or showy demonstrations. The old tired man also complains bitterly that man has little regard for nature. The Blues are a sort of poetical-political glossary of the present time (Italy in the 70s); they start from the "vegetal", to get to the human (or what's left of it), to its political dissolution. This is a key movie for understanding the transition of the cinema of Lajolo-Lombardi, from the militant films of the early '70s , to the following isolation.

Prison as the repressed side of an entire society. As such, it flows in the long monologue of an ex-con recorded by the analogue videotape which, still at his dawn, captures it in its integrity.

The struggles of the workers at Montedison in Porto Marghera, following an accident that resulted in the deaths of three people.

Experimental short film by Anna Lajolo and Guido Lombardi.

"D" originates from and proceeds through the interpenetration of unreality and reality. The places subject to a long and silent violence are the small towns of eastern Liguria [...] The film is a poem about Liguria, where the critical description of the present contrasts with that of a balanced world like Virgil's.

The documentary deals with the struggle s to obtain decent housing in a metropolis such the capital city of Italy in which the right for all to an acceptable dwelling is met with by all kids of serius obstacles-the chaotic increase of urbanization, the building speculation, the degradayion of suburbs, the magnitudine of slums with their unfortunatle inhabitants whose living condition have been dramatic for years. Starting from the Roman situation, the documentary faces the general housing problem in the country as whole and therefore the problrm of the struggles which people support - also through new structures such as People's Councils and Commitees - on the entire national territory in oder to attain one the primary goals of a decent society: a home whorty of its name for all its citizens.

In a construction site near Rome, a Calabrian construction worker dies. The emigrant's hard life is reconstructed through the words of his fellow workers and family, interviewd between Rome and Calabria. One of the first experiments of collective directing that will later turn into the group Videobase.

A homosexual works by day in an office and goes home in the evening to dress up as Bette Davis and reads parts from her most famous films in an imaginary dialogue with some unknown admirer.

Rome is home to the most beautiful and famous fountains in the world. Monumental and spectacular works by celebrated artists and architects adorn equally famous squares, but there are also smaller fountains and secluded fountains in certain corners of the city that enchant with their uniqueness. Large and small, they are all part of Rome's artistic heritage and history. The film features one hundred and twenty public fountains, representing the daily spectacle of Rome's water, a theater of human and mythological figures, bestiaries, and symbols, with the music of water that has spanned the centuries. And in the film, it is a fountain, the Mascherone on Via Giulia, that tells the story of Rome's water, its millennia-old aqueducts, and its countless fountains. The constant gushing of the fountains, sometimes abundant and spectacular, sometimes subdued, is the deep breath of the Eternal City.

Documentary shot for RAI Italian television on Tristan da Cunha, an active volcanic island with rare wildlife and home to British Citizens living in the world's most isolated settlement.

Video short for RAI Italian television, and part of the bigger project of duo Lajolo-Lombardi on insular communities, which became their main cinematic focus with a group of documentaries shot in the '90s after the experience of Videobase with Alfredo Leonardi.

Omsa Sud workers’ struggle to keep the factory occupied. The documentary was partially realized within a project financed by the city of Fermo, which initially included the idea of teaching video shooting techniques as part of a laboratory. Omsa Sud was shot only in one week, an unusual occurence for the Videobase group, and features as part of their methodology the "video within the video" approach.

The focus of this documentary is the nurses and porters working at the Policlinico universitario Umberto I in Rome, which demand equal treatment within a militan action that follows the steps of the operaist labor struggles in factories.

Documentary about life in Italian working class neighborhoods.

A television experiment, filmed with the first portable video recorders, in the Ligurian community of Carloforte, on the island of San Pietro: for two months, the small crew lived in close contact with the people and their daily lives. They created a collective portrait, featuring former ore carriers, seafarers, salt workers, fishermen, tuna fishermen, industrial workers in the Sulcis area, young men and women from the nautical and teaching sectors, and the women, "white widows," wives of sailors, entrusted with raising their children. Three years later, in light of the changes, that first portrait—comprising life, work, feelings, and hopes, past and present—was shown to the islanders in the streets, squares, workplaces, and schools. Reactions and comments were filmed and incorporated into the final edit, which showcases the process and working method. Video is used as a means of recognition, identity, participation, and horizontal dialogue, a pioneering "street television."

Filmed for Rai 3 and aired on two evenings on 29 March and 5 April 1986, A train in the heart of the south is a journey that follows the "marginal" railways of the south and the marginalized who are found along them. Filmmakers and travelers Anna Lajolo and Guido Lombardi reveal the confined and marginalized Italy that has nothing in common with the glossy images of the 1980s. As always with the couple of filmmakers born on the wave of underground cinema, the filmed space is a conflictual space, which "fists with reality".

Stories of Italian emigrants in Berlin declined without an ethic of sacrifice and goodism but through a sense of the ferocity necessary to wrest survival from the miserable life that capitalism has offered and continues to impose on us.

Documentary on the fight for housing in the 70s in Magliana, a popular neighborhood of Rome.