Miren Gutierrez* and Oriana Boselli interview filmmaker ERIK GANDINI
ROME, Sep 15 (IPS) – Something new is appearing on the Italian screen. About time, some may say.A documentary titled Videocracy by Erik Gandini shows the face of Italian television, about 90 percent of which is controlled by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi through his private media empire Mediaset and the state television RAI.Dissenting voices in RAI have been silenced since Berlusconi was first elected in 1994. And on Mediaset, gossip and cheap entertainment rule, and women have become decoration.
Artists are now speaking up, Gandini says in a telephone interview from Stockholm. Such as Lorella Zanardo who made the documentary Il Corpo Delle Donne. “Since we put our video on our website we have had more than 250,000 people (downloading the film).”
Produced in Sweden with the support of Scandinavian media organisations, Videocracy has been shown at the last Venice and Toronto film festivals. A trailer offered to Mediaset and RAI was not broadcast because it was considered a “political message” against the government. The film couldn’t have arrived at a worse time for Berlusconi, in the thick of sex scandals.
Gandini talks about the humiliating use of women’s bodies on screen and the brainwashing Italians have been subject to for three decades by Berlusconi’s TV empire.
IPS: You say in the film that we have to step into Italy’s television in order to understand it. But you are an Italian who has stepped out of Italy…
ERIK GANDINI: It is very difficult to make documentaries in Italy because television doesn’t finance them, and if they are shown at all on television, it is very late at night. Meanwhile, Scandinavia has a long tradition of documentary making. Documentaries here have more dignity, and they are funded by television.
In Sweden, documentaries are premiered in cinemas, and offered several times a week on television at prime time. On state television, they are considered a key part of society’s wellbeing. It could be the same in Italy; it is a question of choice. But this choice has never been made, and documentaries have been marginalised.
