The Pioneers is a comedy that tells with grace and irony the prank of a group of kids in rebellion against their parents. Directed by Luca Scivoletto, whom we met and who, like two of the protagonists, grew up in a communist family.
A delicate, ironic and intelligent film has just arrived in our theaters that takes us back to a time when Berlinguer it was a point of reference and the political ideas of the parents had an inexorable impact on the lives of their children. The Pioneers in fact, it tells a bit of the young man’s summer enricowho escapes from an “alternative vacation” around the branches of the Communist Party to go camping with a best friend Renato, who believes in the hammer and sickle. They are joined by a multiple failure whose father is the country’s fascist, and along the way the three cronies come across an American girl who fled from the nearby US military base.
The Pioneers is directed by Luca Scivolettowho was also raised by communist parents and who focused on an age, pre-adolescence, often told by cinema, for example by Stand by me. Our interview with the director, who is also a cinephile, starts right from this complex phase of life. “I wanted to talk about pre-adolescence” – he explains – “first of all because it has been investigated a lot by cinema, and therefore many films of my training as a spectator and a cinephile tell precisely that period. I think it is a moment in our lives of radical transformation , perhaps the one in which you change the most. Furthermore, the theme of the film, or rather what it narrates, corresponds to my pre-adolescence, and therefore it was natural for me to identify with the point of view of those who at the time – it was 1990 – witnessed a series of changes that concerned Communism or politics in general, for example the fall of the Berlin Wall and Italy that was towards the end of the First Republic.At that time I was nine years old, and we were going through a phase history of great importance characterized by the end of the Cold War. Talking about these things through the eyes of some kids who are not yet politically mature seemed to me an original idea”.
Is the story of Enrico and his communist family your story? What relationship did your parents have with politics?
My family had a very strong relationship with politics, my father was a leader of the Communist Party, and so I’ve been swimming in this aquarium since I was a kid. Were mine like this? They were a little less rigid than how I represented them, because in reality they weren’t the ones I wanted to represent, even though there are things that I stole from my family. In general though, I showed the typical communist family. There were many like that in the 80s and 90s too. They were rigid but started from good assumptions, namely from an education that had to be centered on some important values, in particular not giving in to the temptation of easy things and easy consumption. Basically these families were right, but at 12 you are growing up and you want to integrate. Your priority is to be like the others and therefore the clash with your parents is inevitable. It happened to me too. I then grew up in Sicily, within a communist family, and therefore, in addition to having an education of that type, I found myself in a context in which I was marginal with respect to local customs, in which a culture rather than other Christian Democrat, conservative and Catholic.
While the adults, in the film, remain anchored to their own positions, the boys overcome diversity, especially through play and curiosity towards the other sex. In this way they find a way of communication. It is a very beautiful thing…
Kids live their moment of growth according to needs that are typical of their age: the search for an identity and curiosity about everything that happens in the field of love, from first kisses to the search for first love, not to mention trying to deal with your shyness. In such a context, it is obvious that one completely overcomes the political differences concerning one’s parents and also oneself, because each of us at that age also carries with one’s own family upbringing, be it political or not. You overcome everything when you are very young. Among other things, the kids in the film live in a village, and the good thing about growing up in a small city is having to deal with transversal social relationships. You can easily have in the same class the son of an aristocrat and the son of a plumber, and then communists, fascists, etc. enrico, Renato, Margherita e Vittorio they overcome their diversity: perhaps they will have adolescence and adulthood to return to positions of opposition. I liked the idea of reconstructing this world of theirs, suspended between reality and imagination, in which very distant universes collide and then recompose themselves in a different way.
Enrico has visions of Berlinguer who talks to him and gives him advice. The boy is not happy about it and tries to drive the politician away. How did you come up with this ghost? And how did Claudio Bigagli approach the character?
I’ve never seen it appear BerlinguerBut Berlinguer he’s kind of a role model and ghost for the world I grew up in. You are one of those characters in Italian history who are our references. Obviously there are others as well, but my way of looking at that era, also full of contradictions, is in any case linked to that figure. So I started from there, as well as the idea that Enrico Berlinguer was a bit of an imaginary friend. Berlinguer it is also the positive image that the protagonist enrico he has of the world he grew up in. At the same time Berlinguer he is a somewhat fatherly figure from which he must free himself. We are educated in a certain way. Then, suddenly, there comes a time growing up where we want to say no to our parents. There is a part of us, which we could consider a sort of super-ego or very strong inner conscience, which tells us: don’t do this, because this is in contradiction with who you are and with the way they have educated you. , and then, together with the other writers, we made sure that one person embodied this theme. Era Enrico Berlinguerand a similar narrative trick also gave us the opportunity to create a Berlinguer a bit likeable uncle, always with a cigarette in his mouth. It is a Berlinguer of fantasy in which we have also placed our perception of him. Anyway, I learned from what I’ve read that he was a deeply likable person in the private sphere, but very serious, albeit kind and sweet, in the political sphere. Claudio Bigagli he embodied exactly that Berlinguer with poetic licence. I didn’t want to create the mask of Berlinguera character that you see it and say, ‘Look how much it is equal to Berlinguer!’ No: look how much it is Berlinguer inside. Bigagli he did a great job because he is a great actor, and he has become the perfect embodiment of the Berlinguer of our memories.
The Pioneerswhich is distributed by Fandango, also stars Matthias Bonaventure, Francesco Cilia, Danilo DiVita, Matilde Sofia Fazio, Peppino Mazzotta, Lorenza Guess, Eleanor Danco, Elvira Camarrone, Maurice Bologna.
