La città dentro (The City Within)

The city is Bologna, between 2019 and 2020, explored by the perception of a visually impaired boy waiting for the recognition of his Italian citizenship and a kid who suddenly finds herself spending her days at home.

Filmon has lived in Bologna for half of his life, studying political science, playing baseball in a team of visually impaired athletes and moving around the city’s arcades, squares and historic buildings with ease. Filmon does not think of the city as a map seen from above, his city expands from under his feet, widens like a star, always passing through the same points, unwinding in the smallest details of an endless ribbon, a maze of possible pathways recognized by touch and hearing. The urban tangle is domesticated by the physical action of walking, one day with a snappy body and another with a tired body, sitting on the fresh stones of the Public Library in the summer heat, locating a scent of warm lard in the still air of the autumn gouache or following the pungent smell of the detergent that dries along the streets in the spring breeze.

The second half of the film adopts the perspective of Ada, a ten-year-old girl who suddenly passes from the hustle and bustle of games with friends under the arcades of the center, to the silence of an empty house and a locked city in the midst of the pandemic. Ada tells the story of Filmon on the day he becomes an Italian citizen, a country he has never seen with his own eyes, while the city of the future Ada imagines is all different from the one that is about to turn on (reignite) again beyond her balcony.

The film is co-produced by “A-Place: Linking places through networked artistic practices” and LOOP Barcelona, subtitled in English and provided by the audio description in Catalan realized by Narratio, llengua i accessibilitat, SCP.

Co-founded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the project A-PLACE. Linking places through networked artistic practices.