Search Film, Company, People...

THE IMPORTANCE OF SHOCKING: GUALTERO JACOPETTI

L'IMPORTANZA DI ESSERE SCOMODO: GUALTIERO JACOPETTI

By Andrea BETTINETTI

Documentary - Post-Production 2009

The life of cult figure Gualtiero Jacopetti: soldier, journalist, film director, playboy, tireless traveller. A visionary who speaks his own brand of excessive, wild truth. A character of a utopian desire to reveal the complexity of humankind, who often resembles madness.

- Year of production
- 2009
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- ITALY
- Languages
- ITALIAN, ENGLISH
- Budget
- 0 - 0.3 M$
- Duration
- 90 mn
- Director(s)
- Andrea BETTINETTI
- Writer(s)
- Andrea BETTINETTI
- Producer(s)
- Gabriella MANFRÈ (Invisibile Film), Enzo COLUCCIO (ARdaco), Franco BOCCA GELSI (GAGARIN SRL)
- Synopsis
- The documentary tells the story of cult figure Gualtiero Jacopetti: soldier, partisan, spy, journalist, film director, playboy, actor, tireless traveller.
  Jacopetti is often accused of being the father of trash cinema and television with his shockumentary ‘Mondo Cane’ (1961), a mix between a horror film and a reportage, which has attracted at the time moviegoers all around the world originating endless imitations and deeply influencing contemporary television.
  Considered by some a cynical nihilist who exploited the cultural ignorance of society at the time to feed it with shock images and pure violence, by others an arrogant adventurer with a superman vision, he is definitely a playboy with a dark side and a disturbing attraction for minors, who scattered scandals everywhere he travelled.
  Genius, contemptible, accused of being a sadistic racist and a fascist, Gualtiero Jacopetti – born in 1919 – had the destiny or uncanny ability to be at the centre of events that made history. A story which encompasses the catastrophic Italian intervention in the Second World War, the quest for Mussolini-Churchill secret letters for the CIA, the economic boom of the fifties, the Roman ‘Dolce Vita’ with its excesses and scandals, the student and workers revolts of the sixties, the beginning of terrorism and the end of European colonialism in Africa with all the violence and cruelty.
  These are only some of the chapters in this incredible, puzzling and some times disturbing life. Through conversations with Jacopetti, who at 90 years old is alert, well informed and still highly provocative, we want to present Gualtiero Jacopetti as the hero of a Herzog movie who ends up defeated and forgotten, a visionary who speaks his own brand of excessive, wild truth. Then with interviews with people who worked with him, who liked him, who hated him, who shared part of their lives with him, our intention is to reveal the complexity of the facts that flooded his extraordinary, shocking, adventurous, eccentric life.
  In fact, he states “someone very important said: it’s not the fact that matters, but the idea of the fact itself. Actually, the ambiguity with which the pure and simple fact is filled, is the only answer that allows someone to get as close as possible to the real truth”.
- Partners & financing
- Provincia di Milano