I love the title; it’s simple, strong, and to the point. Noi Credevamo – We Believed.
We, the people, believed; but in what? The 2010 movie, Noi Credevamo is about the Italian Unification and after having watched the movie I know two things: 1) I hadn’t understood very much about Italian history and 2) I still don’t. I also have learned, from the movie, that Italy’s struggle for freedom was like most country’s – it was long, hard and complicated. The process started around 1815 and ended around 1871 with the Franco-Prussian War, so many of the people who began the uprising weren’t around to see the results, and there were many who were born into a conflict that they had nothing to do with the conflict’s birth.
The movie uses three fictional members of Italy’s Giovane Italia (political group started by Giuseppe Mazzini )to tell us how Italy went from being small kingdoms to a larger, unified country and did it with their three very different points of view. It’s such a big story, obviously, and the movie suffers a little from the problem of “too much to tell in too little time” but all things considered it does a pretty good job. Noi Credevamo doesn’t glamorize or idealize the conflict. It illustrates expertly the way the different factions and philosophies caused polarization within the conflict and how it threatened to tear things apart. In fact, after watching the movie I think it’s a miracle that it succeeded it all. It doesn’t sugar coat the flaws of the founding fathers, and it show how their principles, what they believed, was even more important than nationalism.
The language was not easy for me to understand and unfortunately my husband can’t even watch it because there are no English subtitles. Hopefully since it won at Venice ( Guglielmo Biraghi Award ) and the Nastro d’Argento award) it will be distributed outside of Italy. Enjoy it on DVD, but this is one of those “Gone With The Wind” type movies that you really need a movie theater experience watching it on a big screen in a theater and eating bad popcorn.
I Love Italian Everything 