South Atlantic

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.

Experimental short by Anna Lajolo and Guido Lombardi.

Two segments. The first one arranges six stories from Cesare Pavese’s «Dialoghi con Leucò», taken from classical mythology. The second segment is taken from Pavese’s novel «La luna e i falò»: after World War II the emigrant «The Bastard» comes back to his village in the Langhe (northern Italy) to find out that everyone he knew has died, and that the war has deeply changed relationships between people.

With rapid editing that alternates a wide range of sources through an extensive variety of shooting and editing techniques, A Corpo is a drift through the consumer imagery of the day, in which the body of the single individual corresponds to political struggle, militancy and anti-imperialist engagement against the war in Vietnam. —Tate Modern

It is a film about real people who have had and continue to have adversarial relationships with society. These individuals recount dramatic, traumatic personal experiences of flight, emigration, and segregation.

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.

Collective manifesto by the members of C.C.I. It is a collective film, the result of an operation devoid of any aesthetic purpose: to verify the existence of any harmony between a fairly large group (twelve people) of members of the independent Cooperative. Someone, who had the idea, turned 60 meters of Ektachrome according to the moods –or discontent – of the moment and gave them to others to see. The others reacted, each with their own piece. It was then thought to call the film “circular letter”. It was not so simple and so quick: the operation, which started in June of ’68, ended in March of ’69.

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Experimental short film by Anna Lajolo and Guido Lombardi.

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".