Piazza San Carlo, Turin in the middle of the night. Under the arcades of the square to steal the attention of Domenico Calopreste, director and actor, there is a sadly common image in the heart of Turin. Near one of the elegant columns of the square there is a makeshift arrangement including blankets, umbrellas and a sign. “I lost my home, thanks to those who help me” is written on the cartons placed in front of him.
He is a homeless man, one of the many who have crowded the streets of the city center. And the shot by Domenico Calopreste shared online denounces the situation, focusing on the image behind the homeless situation. On the column stands an advertisement for Chanel, a luxury brand, which the director marks with a caption “Advertising and reality”. A complaint about the city that has not gone unnoticed. A scene that is repeated in the city, making it a daily drama.
Mimmo (Domenico) Calopreste knows Turin well, where he arrived from Calabria at the age of eight with his family. His father, in the early 1960s, moved with his family to the Piedmontese capital to work as a worker at Fiat. Calopreste, a degree never taken in Literature and Philosophy, was one of the protagonists of the great season of Turin documentary makers who in the Eighties told about the working world, the social contradictions, the political clash of that period. Award-winning films in independent film festivals, such as those of Salsomaggiore, Turin, Bellaria and then reaching international reviews in Madrid, Stuttgart, Munich, Barcelona. The thirty-year-old Calopreste, for the Audiovisual Archive of the Labor and Democratic Movement, created in 1985 “About sbavature”, winner of the Turin Youth Film Festival. Before changing genre, the direction of two documentaries on workers’ struggles in the war years: “1943 The choice” and “Pane pace e libertà 1943-1945”. Precisely because of his commitment to recounting the difficult realities of Turin, the photo posted on social networks by Calopreste takes on a particular value. These words, taken from the cd “Turin city of cinema” by Davide Bracco, seem the natural caption to that photo: “I love this contrast: Turin is a hard city, the city of the factory, the city of things that I like less than life . But it is also a city to which I am very attached from a personal, human and also professional point of view, since my work with cinema starts from Turin, from its cultural and political ferment, from its festival, from all the people with whom I made short films, documentaries, initiatives, in a sort of ideal continuation of what was called “militant cinema”, made by political militants who independently made films as a political practice, touring in front of the factory, giving a voice to the workers, discussing in meetings the shot materials. We videomakers, years later, have absorbed something of that world and even if our works were completely different we started from the same idea: the possibility of intervening in reality “.