Working Slowly (Radio Alice)

Bologna, 1976. Two young friends, neither studying nor working, start digging a tunnel through the cellars of the neighbourhood to get at the safe of a bar. The longer the job takes, the more the world above them changes: Radio Alice has gone on air in the same street. Small transmitter, phone line open, anyone can talk. Students, the unemployed, poets, people losing their minds. Both of them end up inside that broadcast. Before the tunnel is finished the city is in the street. Guido Chiesa directs; a hundred and eleven minutes. Radio Alice was real: the carabinieri shut it down on 12 March 1977, the day after a student was shot dead by police. The title comes from a song of the period: work slowly.