SACRO GRA

Italy, 2013, 93 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi.

This documentary made quite some impact in its native Italy. It won the Lion in Venice, 2013, the first documentary ever to win this award and the first Italian film since 1998 to win.

While the appeal would be to an Italian audience, it is much less interesting to a non-Italian audience. After a number of documentaries around the world, the director jump Gianfranco Rosi decided to make a documentary about the ring road around Rome.

However, he also wanted to do portraits of people who live nearby, showing the cars whizzing past in the near-distance but people able to go about their daily life, some completely oblivious of the road.

There are day scenes of cars on the road as well as night scenes with the car lights.

And it will depend on audience interest in some of the characters whose lives are briefly sketched here. For instance, there is a firefighter talking about his life but also seeing him come home after his work. There is a recluse who is studying insects in a garden situation. There is a butcher and his family. There are some religious sequences, especially women praying the rosary. These portraits are intermingled, something like a visual installation illustrating life in this part of Rome.

It has limited appeal because of its narrow focus on Rome and the ways and lives of people in the area without the necessary hooks to involve a worldwide audience in response to universal characters and themes.