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Valerio Jalongo
(Rome, 1960) graduated in Philosophy in 1985, the year he directed Il Volo, an episode of the film Juke-box made with Daniele Luchetti and Carlo Carlei, as a graduation film from the Gaumont Film School. He studied in the US and received a Masters in Filmmaking at USC with Dream City (1988), which also won the Vittorio De Sica Award. In 1996 he made his first feature film, Messaggi Quasi Segreti, winner of Best Film at the 1997 Scrittura e Immagine International Festival, and screened at the Montreal, Mar del Plata, Moscow and Dublin festivals. For two years he led a creative writing group with the prisoners of Rome's Rebibbia jail. In 2005 he made On My Skin, presented in competition at the Turin and Bangkok film festivals. He is currently preparing the feature Laria, the screenplay for which was one of the finalists of the 2002 Solinas Award.
When, exactly four years ago, I began discussing with other directors the idea of an investigation of or “White Film” on Italian cinema, we were fully aware of the difficulties of the undertaking. It had been since The Cinema Machine by [Silvano] Agosti, [Marco] Bellocchio, [Sandro] Petraglia and [Stefano] Rulli that no one tried to create a portrait of Italian cinema: exactly 30 years ago, the years that separated us from the crossroads that the 1970s represented for our country. This long silence and absence already speak for themselves. What happened to Italian cinema? Why did a period that lasted from post-WWII until the 1970s, in which our films excelled throughout the world, both artistically and commercially, come to an end? Unlike other Italian mysteries, here there are no corpses, nor massacres. There are no investigations or trials, nor even headlines. Among the very many unsolved mysteries of those years, this is one of the most neglected. Perhaps because in Italy all that which is not the written word or information is not considered authentically important from a cultural point of view.
Valerio Jalongo
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