Cinema in Sardinia

In 1899, Lumière, through director Francesco Felicetti, shot “Voyage du Roi Humbert Ier en Sardaigne”, five current films that tell the story of the visit of the sovereign and Queen Margaret to the island.
From that date until the 1920s, there are few testimonies on cinema in Sardinia, rare films, shot or only set on the island, such as “Cainà” by Gennaro Righelli, “The Grace” by Aldo De Benedetti or “Ashes” by Febo Mari, the only film with Eleonora Duse, all directly or indirectly inspired by Deledda.
At the Sardinian Film Archive, an archive of regional importance, there are even three versions of “Ash”, all different from each other in length and in their captions, yet to be carefully investigated.
After World War II, the discourse changed, at least from a quantitative point of view: there were numerous productions made with the sponsorship of the Region of Sardinia (especially the Department of Rebirth) and its instrumental bodies such as ERSAT or ESIT. But Sardinia fascinates - for better or worse - even international productions. Disney, and this is perhaps one of the most curious examples, includes Sardinians in the documentary series “Peoples and Countries”, which investigates together Eskimos, American Indians and other “extreme” or endangered peoples, with a film where squirrels run around among the friendly shepherds of Desulo with White Beards, in the best Disney tradition.
In those same years, “The Last Fist of Earth” by Fiorenzo Serra, the greatest Sardinian documentary maker, was shot. The painful and merciless portrayal of the island in Serra's film leads to the definition of the film as “anti-autonomistic, defeatist and bitter”. Precisely this story tells us how today, only through an integrated reading of cultural heritage, with the recovery of archival evidence that reconstructs the historical context in which a film was born, it is also possible to recompose a cinematographic imagination and a history of cinema in Sardinia otherwise destined to oblivion or to very partial interpretations.
“A decade later - writes the critic Gianni Olla in the essay “For a documentary in Sardinia” in “Filmpraxis. Quaderni della Cineteca Sarda” from 1995 - the needs of the media, the appearance of TV... will bring out many interesting variants, first of all the 'boom' of the Costa Smeralda and the problem of banditry. Which, despite being apparently unrelated issues, are nevertheless the clearest example of a chronicle or a current situation linked to an imagination that begins to prevail in the present and not only in the mythical horizon of archaism”.
Even the best works are heavily conditioned by this vision of the island or have to deal with it anyway. This is how it was for Taviani's 'Master Father', contested Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1977, read in Sardinia not as a 'training work' but a lack of ethnographic film.
Around the second half of the eighties, when a new generation of filmmakers emerged throughout Italy, a group of authors also emerged in Sardinia, including Gianfranco Cabiddu, who made his debut with the film “Disfriendship”, readable as a metaphor for Sardinian cinema forced to deal with its heavy legacy.
Other authors and authors, from a generation close to that of Cabiddu, will confront tradition in their own way, some leaving Sardinia and returning there (as a setting) only after a long separation and an excellent affirmation elsewhere (“An Impossible Crime” by Antonello Grimaldi) or courageously refacing Deledda with very personal films (“... With love Fabia” by Maria Teresa Camoglio).
Enrico Pitzianti, in the era of renewed interest in documentary cinema, made his debut in the feature film (“Little Fishing”, 2004), touching with great sensitivity the very current theme of military bases, and the team on Enrico Pau's new film, “Jimmy of the Hill”, shows that the Sardinia of feuds, horrible and picturesque landscapes or holidays on the Costa Smeralda is now replaced by Sardinia's industrial plants, suburbs, marginalization, thus inserting itself into the horizon of modernity.

Update

9/7/2025 - 14:04