At the Pordenone Docs Fest – Voices of the Investigation , a preview of the debut work by Giulian director Franco Giraldi, Il Carso . Giraldi passed away on December 2, 2020, living in a retirement home in Santa Croce, on the Karst plateau. A short film produced by Documento Film and shot on the Trieste Karst plateau during the Christmas holidays of 1959, it was considered lost by the director himself until three years ago. When I was fortunate enough to find a 35mm print, in excellent condition, preserved in the fabulous archives of the Cineteca di Bologna. The restoration was carried out by the L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna and supported by Cinemazero of Pordenone.

A highly personal, bittersweet Western portrait of his homeland by Giraldi, then a former film journalist who had emigrated to Rome and was working as an assistant director. Giuseppe Pinori —who later served as director of photography for Nanni Moretti, Marco Tullio Giordana, and the Taviani brothers—immortalizes the hard daily toil of the fishermen and farmers of Santa Croce/Sveti Križ through indelible images. A rapidly depopulating village, squeezed between the border with Tito's Yugoslavia and the sheer slopes overlooking the Gulf of Trieste.

Callisto Cosulich , a well-known Trieste critic who also emigrated to the capital, composed a lyrical voice-over. Claudio Magris , a longtime friend of Franco Giraldi, introduced the screening at Cinemazero in Pordenone with a moving video interview. “I was enormously pleased by the rediscovery and restoration of The Carso . It's a precious film, in which I encountered the Giraldi I always knew. I must say that I 'am' a friend of Franco; I can't say I 'was' a friend of Franco's, because death has a great deal of power, but it has none over friendship. In this documentary, but also magnificently in his fictional films, the Carso is a true protagonist. From A Year at School to his masterpiece, The Frontier . The Carso, for me and for Giraldi, becomes a character inextricably linked to the history of that era: a harsh, Slataper-esque territory, in contrast to the 'old Europe' of the city of Trieste, where young people still address each other formally.”

Venetian historian Alessandro Cuk, an expert on frontier cinema, recently presented his new book at Kinoateljer in Gorizia: The Istrian Trilogy in Franco Giraldi's Cinema , published by Alcione Editore. A detailed analysis of the Central European cultural roots of the director of Il Carso.

Lorenzo Codelli
Cinecittà News – 17/11/2021

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Last November 5th, the presentation of Alessandro Cuk's new book "The Istrian trilogy in Franco Giraldi's cinema" (Alcione, Venice 2021) at the Casa del Ricordo in Rome, curated by the provincial committee of the National Association of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia, was enriched by the memories of friends of the director from Gorizia who passed away a year ago and by the critical observations of experts who highlighted the merits of Giraldi's work.

Introducing the evening, Prof. Donatella Schürzel, President of the provincial committee of Rome of the Anvgd, also recalled that this year the Anvgd has carried out many initiatives to remember Alida Valli, whose birth centenary is celebrated.

Cuk, film critic and national vice president of Anvgd, then presented his work as a tribute to Giraldi for the sensitivity shown in transferring to the big screen works of fiction set in Istria or Julian (A Year of School, The Red Rose and The Frontier), alternating his reflections with comments by the critic and writer Diego Zandel, with the irony of Olivia La Pegna's youthful memories and with anecdotes of work on the set told by Elisabetta Fogazzaro. Also present in the audience were costume designer Gianna Gissi, set designer Lorenzo Baraldi and photographer and journalist Bernard Bedarrida.

The conference can be viewed on the YouTube channel of the Multimedia Documentation Center of Julian, Istrian, Rijeka and Dalmatian Culture: The Istrian Trilogy in Franco Giraldi's Cinema – Casa del Ricordo (Rome)

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