On the occasion of the Venice Film Festival, in the presence of Mauro Piazza, Undersecretary of the Lombardy Region, Mons. Davide Milani, President of the Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo and Fabrizio Zappi, Director of RAI Documentaries – the presentation was held the new RAI project dedicated to the life of Manzoni, to be released in November, and entirely entrusted to the production of Rampello & Partners. Manzonian Rhapsodythis is its name, it is a documentary film that wants to tell a young audience about Manzoni’s cultural legacy, composed of those values that the author himself cultivated throughout his life and which he then translated and represented in his works. Values that are increasingly relevant today and that must be passed on to new generations beyond academic study, very often didactic and not very engaging.
«In high school, I, like many of my peers, had a teacher who was not able to convey the life and works of Manzoni with the right enthusiasm, as well as other authors, telling them in a correct way, but without stimulating interest, thus failing to make us fall in love with the subject. When I was asked to produce a documentary on Manzoni, the offer stimulated me for this very reason. I immediately asked myself how to make the documentary, moving away from a language and content too often reserved for the few who are already interested in the subject.” says Daniele Rampello, CEO of Rampello & Partners.
The president of the Italian Entertainment Agency, Don Davide Milani, was the convinced promoter and soul of the project. The screenplay of Manzonian Rhapsody, it rests on a specific theme, that of the “crossroads”. In fact, all moral choices often require taking opposite paths: truth or fiction, ideal or useful, right or wrongato. These dilemmas are often found in Betrothed and bring to the surface the human difficulty in deciphering, discerning and choosing. And it is precisely through the paths of the protagonists of these docufilms – which mix fictional situations with a style and aesthetics similar to documentary cinema – that we will discover how by abdicating one’s ability to understand in depth one remains in the crowd, while if one continues to question one’s own reason and free oneself from prejudices to search for the truth, one truly transforms oneself into an evolving people. The body of the docufilm is composed of a dialogue between two contexts: a theater workshop and a Manzonian itinerary. The protagonist is a small theatre company that is preparing to create a reinterpretation of the The Betrothed, but who has some difficulty in understanding the message that the director wants to insert in the show. For this reason they begin a journey to discover the places where Manzoni lived, grew up and has fueled his literary poetics and his vision of life, so as to acquire a greater awareness of the socio-cultural relevance of Betrothed, internalizing more the psychology of the individual characters, so as to better enhance the idea of ”rhapsody”. All with storytelling and filming techniques, which make the fruition fluid and interesting, also and above all for a young audience.
Monsignor Davide Milani stated: «Manzonian Rhapsody It is an appeal that we want to make to everyone from Lecco, from the Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo – with the decisive intervention of Rampello & Partners, Rai documentaries and important companies: It is necessary to take Alessandro Manzoni to heart because this noble father of the Italian language and culture is a source of wisdom to be questioned again and especially today to understand “the essence” of the storythe sense of facts that characterize reality. A project on Alessandro Manzoni that comes from the Lombardy region does not intend to be the solution to tourist or identity needs but is an appeal so that this noble father of ours can be read, understood and above all listened to. We live in an era in which we are overwhelmed by the fragmentation of the story, by the narration in fragments and emotions: we are losing sight of the possibility of grasping the meaning of human experience.
This is the best way to honor “the great Lombard” beyond the usual anniversaries and celebrations. The Betrothed, the Sacred Hymns and all of Manzoni’s works speak to us today: let us read them and let them read us.»
