Nero, Il (1967)
Director/Story: Giovanni Vento – Story/Screenplay: Lucio Battistrada, Franco Brocani, Giovanni Vento – Director of photography: Aiace Parolin – Film editor: Roberto Colangeli – Music: Piero Umiliani with Leandro "Gato" Barbieri (sax) and Laura Betti (voice) - Costume design: Gianna Gelmetti - Production: Filmgroup/Armando Bertuccioli - Country: Italy - Running time: 108’
Cast: Regina Bianchi, Andrea Checchi, Bianca Doria, Alessandra Dal Sasso, Joy Nwosu, Orchidea De Santis, Mario Monaco, Silvano Manera, Gianfranco Transunto, Sennuccio Benelli
The film:
The events in Naples of a few ‘figli della Madonna’ (Madonna’s sons), young people born between 1945 and 1946 from the relationship between the local women and Afro-American soldiers. Il Nero, Giovanni Vento’s first film, premiered in a few national and international festivals in 1947, never entered in the commercial distribution , despite the promotional campaign supported by personalities like Carlo Lizzani and newspapers like Cinema nuovo.
«My film is about youth, where the skin problem is an excuse for the film to be twice about youth. The young characters in the film are twice young: first as twenty year old young people, second as black people. Because the Italian blacks (and not, for example, Americans or Africans) born during the Occupation are the first black people of the Italian history.»
[Giovanni Vento in Lorenzo Camusso, Riccardo Mezzanotte (curated by) La storia del cinema, Vallardi, Milano, 1966-1967, p.226.]
The film restoration:
The digital restoration of Il Nero, has been carried out by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino and COMPASS FILM, from a positive 35mm copy 3100 mt. long, owned by Emilia Vento and conserved by the Museum. The film has been scanned at a 2K resolution and the digitized images have been processed with digital restoration. The original soundtrack has been obtained from the same copy and digitally restored. The restoration was carried out in 2019 at the laboratory Studio Cine in Rome.
We thank Leonardo De Franceschi for the historical consultancy.
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