How is it possible we’re already pretending to have moved on from the effects of the pandemic? Not exterior elements like mask wearing, hand sanitizing and the like, although they’re scarcer than snow in the Alps these days, but the psychological impact of months under lockdown and the ever-closer presence of the Angel of Death. It’s barely addressed now, and yet how many of us, in moments of openness, admit to depression, difficulties in concentration, pessimism? Cinema strangely has been largely complicit in this silence: it’s not woke or fashionable at a time when self-identity triumphs over shared community. Stefano Savona’s outstanding The Walls of Bergamo is a welcome exception, not simply by addressing the pandemic’s devastating toll in Italy’s hardest-hit province, but because it movingly records the human cost with such profound empathy.
All of Italy looked on with uncomprehending horror during the early days of COVID at the situation in Bergamo, a beautiful Renaissance city of 120,000 souls northeast of Milan. 670 people died in March 2020 alone, and approximately 6,000 in the province, just in that one month. Hospitals and morgues were beyond overwhelmed, cascading deaths devastated families and social networks, and those who survived wondered why they too weren’t cut down. Savona and a group of his documentary students arrived in the hilltop city to, at first, bear witness and later to facilitate the collective processing of this tragedy. The over two hour running time may initially put off programmers, but such hesitation need to be ignored: The Walls of Bergamo deserves our attention.
Savona’s previous film Samouni Road is one of the best documentaries about life in the Gaza Strip, its combination of live action and scratchboard animation an especially successful use of hybrid forms that traces the trauma of one family following an Israeli army attack. With his latest he’s chosen a similar experimental approach by incorporating archival footage from home movies, scattered throughout the film and helping to show Bergamo life from the past while also acting as switch points for shifts or emphases in tone. Starting out as a record of the crisis, in which mentally and physically exhausted emergency service providers try to cope with the tidal wave of infections and death, the film gradually shifts to become about the need to process the maelstrom of feelings as a group; in so doing, emotional walls are broken down while the physical walls of Bergamo paradoxically act as a safe space where survivors can express themselves and find support.
When Savona and his students first arrived that March, at least 50 people were dying from COVID-related issues per day in the province. Doctors on the emergency switchboard were having to tell desperate family members there was no point in sending an ambulance because there were no hospital beds for anyone whose age and preconditions meant survival was next to impossible. Making up the protocols as they went along, the healthcare providers could do nothing but suggest ways to make the sick as comfortable as possible, knowing however that they’d ultimately choke to death.
For those fortunate enough to be in hospital, the sense of isolation was unbearable. At one point a doctor talks about breaking procedure and putting a comforting hand on a patient’s shoulder: with no loved one able to visit, it was the only human touch left. In many cases, families might be in different hospitals, such as a woman whose firefighter husband died in one hospital while she was recovering in a hotel converted into a care home; when she finally was COVID negative, she was reluctant to be discharged to her empty apartment in an emptied building, since all her neighbors were either dead or hospitalized. Funeral parlors were in crisis mood, with personnel shortages, backed-up cremations and a scarcity of tombstones. Priests were unable to offer one-on-one comfort.
Gradually the film’s focus shifts away from the immediate crisis as groups of people in the city started to openly discuss how to deal with what they’ve just been through both as individuals and as a community. An outlet was found in an impromptu group therapy collective meeting in the gardens next to the city walls, where a small band of people began to gather out of a common need to share their experiences and openly express the maelstrom of emotions haunting their days and nights. Survivor guilt is a major topic, as is the need to speak about the people they met, as a way of ensuring their stories are told and their lives recorded, just as the archival home movies Savona weaves throughout the documentary record generations of citizens whose lives on this earth would otherwise be forgotten.
With this in mind, the group discuss ways of collecting stories, to fight against the all-too-easy tendency to “return to normal.” There is no return because the social fabric is too full of holes, and only by insisting on remembering can there be a way of moving forward. That’s the ultimate message of The Walls of Bergamo, though sadly it’s the most difficult one to implement since worldwide the mode is to set the trauma aside and act as if it never affected us at all.
One might suspect the documentary would lack visual cohesion, given the number of people helping to shoot the film, but Savona’s guidance ensures it all feels connected, somehow managing to make a collective work feel truly personal not just to the main director but to all involved. While beautifully shot, it doesn’t fetishize the city’s ghostly attractions nor the eeriness of the empty spaces, though certain flourishes, such as a close-up of church incense floating up and slightly clouding Cristoforo Baschenis’ fresco of the Last Judgment in the Santuario della SS. Trinità, add a powerful sense of the past’s persistent presence in our lives.
Director: Stefano Savona
Producers: Andrea Iervolino, Monika Bacardi, Ferdinando Dell’Omo, Danielle Maloni
Cinematography: Stefano Savona, Danny Biancardi, Sebastiano Caceffo, Alessandro Drudi, Silvia Miola, Virginia Nardelli, Benedetta Valabrega, Marta Violante
Editing: Stefano Savona, assisted by Danny Biancardi, Alessandro Drudi, Silvia Miola, Virginia Nardelli, Benedetta Valabrega
Sound: Jean Mallet
Production companies: Iervolino & Lady Bacardi Entertainment, with RAI Cinema
World sales: Fandango
Venue: Berlinale (Encounters)
In Italian
139 minutes
