Golden Lion Winner ‘Sacro GRA’ at New York’s Lincoln Center

I should have known that Sacro GRA would win the Golden Lion at the Venice FIlm Festival last year; the crowd went wild and the ovation was greater and longer than for any other movie.

Sacro GRA was the first documentary to ever win the Golden Lion, and the first Italian film to win in 15 years.

Here’s my original review from Venice, September 2013:

The third Italian film that’s in competition here at Venice is one of two documentaries, Sacro GRA from director Gianfranco Rosi. If audience reaction means anything, and I don’t think it always does, Sacro GRA is the biggest success for Italians at the festival. Rosi and his film’s subjects, many of whom were there for the premier, seemed genuinely appreciative of the extended cheers, shouts of “bravo!”, and standing ovation that followed the screening.

Rosi takes an unusual look at the GRA, the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the giant ring of a highway that circles Rome and the people who live out there. He spent about two years living with them, finding out who they are, and filming them.

In snippets, at times a little too brief, we see the lives of an EMS worker, a scientist studying the area’s palm trees, strippers, and a kitschy couple and their kitschy house that gets rented out for parties and for movie sets. The clear favorite of the director and audience were Paolo and Amelia, father and daughter, sharing a teeny tiny apartment and watching the world of the GRA philosophically from their window. In a world obsessed with TMI, too much information, Rosi could have given us a little more than the small glimpses through windows and flashes of conversation.

I thoroughly enjoyed all of these people, but in the end, don’t really understand their lives or if Rosi was getting at anything in particular. Maybe he’s like Horton in Horton Hears a Who! and he wants to let us all know about the citizens of the GRA, like those of Whoville, living largely unnoticed on that speck of dust by the highway. Maybe he wandered by one day and heard them calling out, “We are here! We are here!” and just wanted us to know.