SYNOPSIS
Between May 16 and 17, 2023, a catastrophic event, an obvious manifestation of global warming, occurred in much of Romagna, a province in central northern Italy : a flood, tropical in character, lasting more than 36 hours that poured 250 million cubic meters of water over the territory, causing the overflow of 23 rivers and streams and thousands of landslides in 100 different municipalities in Romagna.
This film is a journey through lands, cities, neighborhoods and lives affected, muddied and landslided. Free and irreverent words denounce the failures of institutions in securing rivers and territories, before and after the flood. They point the finger at the gears of a climate-altering development model incapable of taking a step backward in terms of cementing fragile territories, planning major road works and building commercial and housing complexes in areas of high or medium flood risk. All this at a time in history when an environmental paradigm shift should impose itself at every level, from politics to the economy via society and culture as a whole.
IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS
Thermometers to extremes, periods of blindness and monsoon regimes have multiplied in more parts of Europe and the world the last 2 years with a last episode in September 2024 in the exact same territories affected in May 2023 and narrated in this documentary. This repetition of rainfall of such an intensity comes to confirm that these extreme manifestations of climate are not exceptional!
Administrators, politicians, businesses, and climate-altering development patterns still in place need to be laid bare in the face of the criticality of the situation.
Romagna Tropicale attempts to do so by methodically revealing to the screen the case of “bad schooling” in the Emilia-Romagna region. It does so by narrating and memorializing the disastrous impact these extreme manifestations of climate change have on people’s lives, and by putting under the spotlight models of development and administration of territories in this region that could qualify as criminal at this point in time.
We seek to take on the backlash and bounce back in the faces of some administrators, government politicians, and entrepreneurs the concept of eco-terrorism and the criminalization that they seek to ramp up in the minds and folds of the law, through a security ddl, which criminalizes those who seek to denounce and demonstrate against unnecessary and climate-altering large-scale works and the diseased gears of our development systems that endanger life on earth.
DIRECTING AND PRODUCTION NOTE
This documentary is made in two stages, one week after the disaster and 8 months after.
One objective is to narrate and make memory of the impact of an epochal phenomenon, global warming, by repositioning the responsibilities of climate-altering development patterns inherent in the policies and entrepreneurship of this region at the center.
The various rounds of filming were carried out with a light team: director/cameraman equipped with a Lumix S1 SLR, a couple of lenses, tripod and stabilizers, accompanied by a direct audio grip sound engineer.
This small, close-knit team, for the first round of filming, decided to venture out following the thread of happenings, encounters and discoveries. On the field of travel and encounter with the unknown, the many stakes of the themes raised in the documentary were revealed to their understanding.
After this initial tuff, the time of study begins for the filmmaker to deepen his knowledge of a region to which he had never gone before. And it is then that he discovers and reads the texts and critical readings of the WU MING elaborated around the flood and decides to involve them to contribute their analyses and voices to the narrative of the documentary.
And a self-produced work. The first round of filming was financed by a Genovese web broadcaster who sent the filmmaker in the intent to make small pills on the subject of extreme manifestations of global warming. Coming out of that dense first round of filming, strong from all the reflections gained in the field, the director decided independently to pursue a more in-depth, totally self-produced documentary work. Halfway through, after the drafting of a first edit elaborated from the material collected in the first round of filming, zalab and openddb express interest in distributing the documentary on their platforms.
