The Shameful Story
A documentary movie about the Mass Migration to the Americas in the early 1900s, told through a return journey of today. Based on true stories and new unpublished movie pictures, La Storia Vergognosa - The Shameful Story is a movie about the great Italian emigration in early 20th century to North America, the largest European mass migration of that time. The story is narrated by a group of street artists that crosses the travel path of a young lady, descended from a Sicilian family that emigrated to America, driven by a strong desire to go back to her mother country and discover her family roots.
Interview with writer/director Nella Condorelli
Congratulations. Why are you making this film?
Thank you! In addition to journalism (the profession that I have done for many years), my great passion as a director is the historical and investigative documentary. In particular, the documentary that investigates the "invisible" history of peoples, movements, women, the struggles for freedom, peace, solidarity, work. This story is rarely told in books that are full of war and military conquests.
For some years now I have been investigating the invisible history of Sicily, the land where I was born and live. A land of which we speak a lot, in every part of the world, almost always for the facts of the Mafia. An unjust and partial narration, but above all historically false.
My documentary movie The Shameful Story born from this investigation, and represents the second documentary of a trilogy begun with the docufilm, "1893. The investigation" dedicated to a page of forgotten Sicilian history: the movement of the Workers' Fasci in Sicily in the late nineteenth century. A movement formed by hundreds of thousands of men and women farmers and artisans that British and American historians consider the most important of 19th century Europe with the Paris Commune.
Investigating this invisible page of the history of Sicily, linked to the epic of the peasant struggles for the land, and the consequences of the repression of a modern movement, which certainly would have weighed on the whole of the twentieth century, I arrived at the Great Italian Emigration towards the Americas.
It is the theme of The Shameful Story. Five million people who between 1880 and 1915 left from all regions of Italy, after 1900, mostly from Sicily. The biggest European emigration of the early twentieth century. The America they found, the existence and identity that they built.
Inside there are stories of strikes for work, life in the factory, racism, the males left for the mines of Colorado or for the plantations of the South, the work of children. The elevated railways of New York and the arrival of the Barnum Circus together with the lunch of Saint Joseph. The letters of protest written to the government and to the American president by the widows of the lynched Sicilians in New Orleans, 1891, which intended to cause the complete rehabilitation of the victims and the compensation for moral and material damages.
Imagine being a member of the audience, why should you watch this movie?
The theme is memory, history, time. The past time and the present time. In the documentary movie we follow Fiorella, a young woman, a high fashion model, the fourth descendant of a family of emigrants who left around 1910 for South America, who returned to Sicily to learn about the land of her great-grandparents. The Sicilian landscapes are the less known ones, in the film I show the mountainous and lonely Sicily of the island center. In autumn (the season in which she emigrated) it is colored with all the shades of red.
Fiorella is a true character, and her desire to recover the original cultural component of her Italian-American identity is real. In the film she meets a company of street actors who are trying out a show in a theater that will prove to be a bit magical. The show is called "When the emigrants were us". The first actress is called Mnemosyne. This name was imposed on me while I was studying the Atlas Mnemosyne by Aby Warburg, entitled to the Memory, mother of all the Muses. With Mnemosyne there are a storyteller and a group of jugglers and fire spiters. When they meet Fiorella, we immediately understand that the girl is the most important clue, the sliver forward of a story suspended between the present and the past that attracts us on the screen with the evocative power of the archive images of the first American social cinema and European.
"To understand how things end, you need to know where it all started ...", says Mnemosyne to Fiorella during the show. It is a question that directly challenges the viewer. Yesterday's Sicily becomes a metaphor, and the journey of the emigrants of a hundred years ago is reflected in the condition of those who today migrate to our shores. From all the south of the world. A very current theme, which scandalizes and touches deeply.
How do the universal and personal themes work in your film?
I am a daughter and nephew of emigrants, my grandfather Antonio left Sicily in the great exodus of the early twentieth century and after a series of troubles settled in Asuncion, in Paraguay. My grandmother Marieta was originally from Lucania, she married my grandfather at the age of sixteen, he was twenty-five years older. My mother and her sisters were born on the banks of the Paraguay River. So the film has its roots in my personal story, but it's not a film about an individual story, it's a portrait of a collective story. "Why do the Sicilians leave?", asks at the end 'u Pircanti, the man of the ancient fairy tales, the truvatura, the essence of Sicilian culture, which Mnemosyne meets perched on a concrete beam in the woods.
This is what we say today, "why do Africans, Mexicans, Syrians leave?" So, as we follow Fiorella and Mnemosyne's company, we are witnessing a universal story that directly questions our conscience about prejudices, about the weight of clichés, about how they also influence peace and war. There is a negative that we carry within us, what drives us to live as if we were alone, which arms the armies for the conquest, which nourishes the logic of imperialism, with this film instead I would like to push a special "war", the one with ourselves so as not to give up on this negative. In the end, it's a film about our possibility of redemption.
How did the subject and script evolve during development?
At the beginning I had only the role of Mnemosyne and his company of street artists, a modern Tespi wagon where everyone plays different characters of the same story. The red thread is the chronicle of an emigrant journalist of the time without hairs on the tongue, Adolfo Rossi, who emigrated from Rovigo to New York just twenty years old. Rossi has left us two very truthful journals “An Italian in America” and “In the Land of Dollars”. The title – The Shameful Story” - goes back to this phase and I have never changed it.
It refers to the "feeling of shame" regarding the condition of emigration that I found in many letters of this first generation of emigrants, as if emigrating were a personal fault and responsibility. The official narration always focuses on the intimate aspects of the condition of emigrant, on "nostalgia", while it is silent on the liberal policies of the Italian government in the early twentieth century, on agreements with the United States, Brazil and Argentina for the overseas export of low-cost Italian labor force. On the other bank there were not roses and flowers, as well as with the padron system we had to deal with racism and racial prejudices. For the children of that generation, Italian identity would have become a burden. Fiorella is the twist. The turn of the movie was his arrival.
I developed the script along three tracks: his meeting with Mnemosyne's company and the journey that women perform together; the immersion in the social context of the Great Emigration, especially the life of women (an absolutely new aspect because female emigration is not really spoken); the answer to why Fiorella has come to look for. For this, he needs to know the past and to place it in History, the key to the my documentary movie is here.
What kind of feedback have you received so far?
The film has been recognized as a "national interest" by the Directorate General of Cinema of Mibact/ Italian Ministry of Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism, and has been selected as part of the tender for the Cinema Sensi Contemporanei Program, managed by the Special Office for the Cinema and Audiovisual / Sicily Film Commission of the Tourism Sport Entertainment Department of the Sicilian Region with the granting of an economic contribution to production.
We have obtained the associated production of Istituto Luce Cinecittà and Historical Archive of the Labor and Democratic Movement. We hope to discuss the project with RAI Cinema. Recently, we have signed a collaboration with the philanthropic association Filitalia International & Foundation, Philadelphia,. PA, and we also received the patronage of the Italian Embassy in Paraguay and of the Italian Federation of the Press, and in New York of the group NYWIFT New York Women in Film and Television.
An important feedback came from the audience that crowded the presentations of the project in Italy, many recognized themselves in history and felt themselves to be protagonists, in almost all the Italian families there is a relative who emigrated. An equally significant feedback is what we received in the Sicilian locations of the film. Adults and teenagers who got involved in filming, also follow us on social media, and urge us to continue.
Has this feedback surprised or confirmed your point of view?
I can say that it largely confirmed my point of view. The Mass Italian and Sicilian Migration in the Americas of the early twentieth century touches a nerve discovered in Italian society, precisely because it is an experience that touches almost all families, from north to south. So, a confirmation but also a challenge.
What are you trying to achieve by making your movie more visible on www.wearemovingstories.com ?
I'm interested in sharing the interesting path proposed by your site for supporting independent cinema, exploring the work of other directors, following the stories they tell. I would also like to involve and expand the potential public overseas, to involve associations, historians, teachers with special screenings, to stimulate a debate between two shores.
Who do you need (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, directors of film festivals, journalists) to amplify the message of this film?
As a production we need international sales agents, distributors, media and contacts with festival directors, and sponsors for post-production costs. Currently the film is in editing, and the release is scheduled for the end of summer 2018. We would like to present it with special joint projections in New York, Asuncion and Palermo. As a director, I'm interested in reviews and critical feedback about my work.
What type of impact and/or reception would you like this film to have?
If this film will serve to undermine prejudices and commonplaces about the migrants I will be able to say that I have had a positive response, then I have succeeded.
What is a key question that will help stimulate a debate or start a conversation about your film?
Why do we forget?
What are you currently working on?
The third documentary of my trilogy dedicated to the invisible history of Sicily, will conclude the twentieth century and will have as an element AIR, while this is under the sign of WATER and FIRE, and the previous under the sign of EARTH.
Interview: June 2018
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We Are Moving Stories embraces new voices in drama, documentary, animation, TV, web series, music video, women's films, LGBTQIA+, POC, First Nations, scifi, supernatural, horror, world cinema. If you have just made a film - we'd love to hear from you. Or if you know a filmmaker - can you recommend us? More info: Carmela
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THE SHAMEFUL STORY
A documentary movie about the Mass Migration to the Americas in the early 1900s, told through a return journey of today. Based on true stories and new unpublished movie pictures, La Storia Vergognosa - The Shameful Story is a movie about the great Italian emigration in early 20th century to North America, the largest European mass migration of that time. The story is narrated by a group of street artists that crosses the travel path of a young lady, descended from a Sicilian family that emigrated to America, driven by a strong desire to go back to her mother country and discover her family roots.
Length: 80'
Director: Nella Condorelli
Producer: Factory Film
Writer: Nella Condorelli
About the writer, director and producer:
Nella Condorelli : A Sicilian, in 2010 she founded the independent film production company Factory Film, with the goals of supporting the production of documentaries, following the national school of historical documentation, and ethnic anthropology. Nella writes and directs her documentary movies, telling unpublishedand forgotten stories. In "1893. The Investigation" (1893. L'inchiesta), she presented for the first time the movement of the Sicilian Workers' Fasci; an event considered by international historians as the most important social movement of the 20th century after the Paris Commune.1893. L’Inchiesta has been successfully presented at the International Venice Film Festival in 2015, is Bandiera Verde Award of the Italian Farmers Confederation, and it was broadcast on the RAI chamnnel. Nella lives and works in a small town on the slopes of Etna volcan.
Factory Film : Founded in 2010 by journalist documentarist Nella Condorelli and director of photography, Vincenzo Condorelli, Factory Film is an independent production company based in Sicily. It prioritizes the production of fiction films and documentaries of a social, historic, and investigative nature. It actively promotes the international participation of young talent in summer school, project scholarships, and international events for independent producers.
Key cast: Enrica Rosso - Francesco Foti - Fiorella Migliore - Evelyn Famà - Matilde Politi - Carmelo Rappisi - I Joculares
with friendly participation of Leo Gullotta
with the musical contribution of the percussionist Alfio Antico
Looking for : producers, buyers, distributors, film festival directors,j ournalists
Social media handles: Factory Film factoryfilm74@gmail.com
Facebook: The Shameful Story. A film project
Twitter: #shamefulstory
Web site www.lastoriavergognosa.com (it/engl)
Funders: Program Sensi Contemporanei Cinema - Special Office for Cinema and Audiovisuals / Sicilia Film Commission - Sicilian Region - Agency for Territorial Cohesion - General Directorate of Cinema; Shooting support of City of Castiglione di Sicilia, City of Comiso, City of Alia, Murgo Tenuta San Michele, Diffusione Tessile srl, Chiara B. -
This documentary movie it as been recognized by the General Directorate of Cinema Ministry of Cultural Heritage Activities and Tourism as a “Film of Cultural Interest”
Made in association with: Istituto Luce Cinecittà - AAMOD Historial Archive of the Labor and Democratic Movement
Where can I watch it next and in the coming month? Theatrical release September 2018 - All updates on social media