San Babila-8 P.M.

The film is set in Milan in 1975. Four young men who hang around Piazza San Babila call themselves fascists and are unemployed, angry and without direction. All day they drift around the square looking for fights, harassing women and attacking anyone they take for a political opponent. Nobody stops them; the police look away, their families take no interest, the neighbourhood has grown used to it. Toward evening all of this arrives at a murder nobody planned. The film comes from a real event: on 25 May 1975 in Milan, near Piazza San Babila, a young man named Alberto Brasili was killed by several people from that same circle. Carlo Lizzani shot it not with known actors but with entirely unknown young people found through auditions, meaning to bring the telling closer to the language of news. The useless crime in the Italian title comes from there. The narrative does not explain the violence through ideology; it builds it out of emptiness, boredom and nobody intervening.