TITLE Piccolo Mondo (Small World)
COUNTRY Italy
YEAR 2023
DIRECTOR Cinzia Canneri
LENGHT 53′ 07″
FORMAT Digital
SOUND Francesco Gatti e Nicola Piovanello
EDITING Francesco Ciarapica
SCREENPLAY Cinzia Canneri
PRODUCTION Gattopicchio, Kansassìti e Mediateca Digitale della Maremma

I seem to recognize the eternal premises of fascism precisely in being provincial (…). We cannot fight fascism without identifying it with our stupid, mean, unrealistic part, a part that has no political party (…), because that part is within each of us. Federico Fellini

Small World is the name of a stilt-house style restaurant built in the 60s in a small town on the Tuscan coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea called Follonica. The restaurant was constructed following the American capitalist myth based on unbridled overbuilding during the years of the economic boom. The city’s clusters of large buildings, factories, and tourist spaces became the emblem of a unified, standardized, and massified population that does not welcome diversity.

In this coastal town, a protest movement called L’Onda was created to prevent the Municipality’s initiative to allocate three hectares of land, fully equipped with both water and energy connections, to two Roma families.

The movement was founded by the leader of said group Dario Piermaria, who gathered 13,000 members mainly through Facebook. The movement sparks a phenomenon and an “Italianness” is demanded that must be defended and respected. Dario, raised by a communist family in the 1970s, inherits the errors of a political class, which, although moved by ideals of democracy and equality, then stumbled upon capitalist corruption, guilty of orphaning future generations.

Then there is Fabio who, despite not championing any particular ideology, is shrouded by ignorance originating from a poor upbringing made up of phrases stolen from the writer Fabio Volo.

In fact, it is precisely the lives of Dario, Fabio, and the Roma in a city that do not remain in the background, but that dictates the punctuation of the meanings of our film, to formulate the implicitly ambiguous question: where do the premises of fascism come from?

After all, the ambivalence of the question leads to an answer that confirms the elusiveness of the social good also expressed by the figure of the elderly master, fascinating in his deliberately whimsical lifestyle, so much so as to recall poetic images then destroyed by the crudeness of his ideas.

Only the Roma children, who play and mourn in the absence of their mother, evoke an innocence close to good, but already marked by evil.

“Francesca where are you? Where are you?” Adrian yells as he plays hide and seek with his sister. Francesca finds herself in a future where her story as a child and a dream has already been lost.

DIRECTOR

Cinzia Canneri

Cinzia Canneri is a photojournalist who documents social issues related to the exploitation of workers, health problems, immigration and gender.

Her story “Women’s bodies as battlefieldies” has received the Camille Lepage award at the Visa Pour l-Image in Perpignan and the first place at Issue Reporting Stories POYi (Pictures of the Year International) in 2022. Instead, her project “Like two wings” on asbestos victims received an award for excellence at the POYi in Science and Natural History Picture Story in 2016 and the first place for Best Portfolio at the Umbria World Fest Award in 2019. 

She published in international magazines such as Lens New York Times, Days Japan, 6mois, XLsemanal, Aftenposten, Internazionale, Mind and Open Migration. She is also a photography artistic director of the FolloWme social art Festival in Follonica (Tuscany).

In recent years, her interest has broadened to documentary filmmaking and she has made a film about an incident of racism that occurred in her home town. A project that analyzed the social dynamics of racism through an intimate account of the people and the city itself.

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