1960

A man tells the story of his family: his older brother emigrated from the South to Milan and has not been heard from. That narration runs over footage of Italy in the year 1960, the Rome Olympics, factories, railway stations, beaches, politics and television. The subject is not nostalgia but being two separate countries in the same year. The North is living through an economic boom while the South empties out, and the narrator's missing brother is the concrete form of that split. The form is built entirely from archive. Not a single new frame was shot; the material comes from the Italian state broadcaster's archive, and the fictional narration is laid over it as voice-over. Documentary and story therefore run at once, without either proving the other. Gabriele Salvatores directs, from a script written with Michele Astori and Massimo Fiocchi. It screened at the Venice film festival in 2010 and was broadcast on Italian television that October. It runs under eighty minutes and is entirely in black and white. Who it is for: viewers interested in archive cinema and in the years of the Italian economic miracle. Who it is not for: anyone wanting dramatic narrative; the fictional layer is thin and the weight sits in the footage.