Davide Crudetti

"La Biennale di Venezia: il cinema al tempo del Covid" is a video diary, produced by the Venice Biennale in collaboration with Rai Cinema and the Istituto Luce Cinecittà, of what went on "backstage" at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, held under the restrictions imposed by the safety protocols required by the covid-19 pandemic.

What does it mean to leave? To leave friends, newborn children, the mountains where you grew up? Get on a bus, towards the big city. Living in a room with five others, identical to thousands of other rooms. What does it mean to return? To see a village of aging elders chasing a future that leaves no room. Replace your wooden house with an identical one made of concrete. We started from the end, from the outskirts of Guangzhou, and arrived at the beginning, in the village of Dimen, looking for those who leave their parents and their children there and leave for the city. An economic boom and all that follows in a small part of a gigantic country. Mingong tells a journey through time, from today’s China to the one that is disappearing.

69 days of isolation, 7 apartments, 1 participatory cinema journey. On March 9, 2020, following the advance of COVID-19, the Italian Government orders mandatory self-isolation for all citizens. During this period, seven of the twenty-five apartments of the social housing project Common Places San Salvario in Turin, begin to tell their stories, each with their own camera. Job insecurity, instability of affections, loneliness. Anna, Mamadou, Waleed and Ajmeen, Simone, Gil, Mother Myriam, Suon Daisy, Sister Milena, Regina and Gideon: a building in Turin becomes a single window onto many different and distant worlds, all united by the same uncertainty, the same concern for the future, the same refuge in the past and in the most intimate affections, to face the precariousness of the present.

In Italy, 1991 is the year in which Davide was born and Communism died. It is the year in which an ideology vanished leaving a trail that will lead him in search of himself and who he really is.