A working class hero is something to be...

Along with the withdrawal into the private sphere in the 80s, after the big struggles of the 60s and 70s, cameras left the factories. Hollywood liked workers, but only when struggling to become pop stars (such as the ultra-sexy engineer Jennifer Beals in Flashdance). Yet if you watch some of the films screened at this festival which deal with the working class (like the marvellous In Fabbrica, by Francesca Comencini, or Signorina Effe by Wilma Labate), you will discover that this is changing. Not every factory worker wishes to be something else : most of them are proud of what they’re doing. Working class cinema has always seemed deeply connected with politically involved directors ; which is why the theme has been all too often relegated to the so-called ‘political film’ genre. Yet a bitter comedy like Irina Palm focuses on the importance of work to define oneself, from an apolitical, original perspective. Other movies like Signorina Effe have a more historical point of view. In Fabbrica is a documentary on Fiat workers which simply lets them speak out.

Torino used to be a factory workers city. Its fortune was built on their sacrifices : it is therefore very important that its main festival dedicates a prize to cinema that deals with this world : the Cipputi prize. Cipputi is a very important Italian cartoon character : a factory worker so human that Italians by now consider him to be a real person. It’s a real Italian - actually a real Torinese story. However these are stories of common people everywhere, with their local differences and global similarities : the perfect global issue.

Maybe men don’t fulfil themselves completely through work, as Marx suggested, but they definitely fulfil an important part of themselves in it. After all, cinema likes heroes, and heroes don’t always wear cloaks ; sometimes they’re just the guys who screwed in all of the 10 000 bolts in a car so that someone could drive it.

Marta Musso