Mountain, Society, Cinema, Literature

The twenty-five readers of these words and anyone with a keen eye will have noticed one particular detail of this year’s catalogue. Last year the words “Mountain, exploration, adventure” were written underneath the traditional logo of the TrentoFilmfestival surmounted by a red eagle between two black square brackets. This year, however, the English legend has been replaced with an Italian one that reads “Montagna, società, cinema, letteratura” (Mountain, society, cinema, literature). The language and content have changed, and this is important. The international flavour of the Festival is not in question; the catalogues of the last fifty-eight years testify to this. Language is a means of communication, but what you say is more important. I wrote in last year’s edition that the old mountains, exploration and adventure were obsolete in an age of satellites, Internet and Google Earth. It was time to look at these worlds from a different angle. “Exploration” was intended as a look at the culture of mountain people, the inhabitants of the “high lands”. “Adventure” meant people’s exploits in their daily lives, which were ones of marginalisation by choice and by fate.

From this point of view, “Montagna e società” best represent the themes of the Festival over the last few years. “Cinema e letteratura” are the tools of the Festival, the lenses through which we look at mountains, their world and their society; they are two lenses of the same microscope. We pay tribute to the people who opened the Festival up to the themes of exploration and adventure in the 1970s and 1980s, a move that caused considerable controversy between traditionalists and innovators; but now we must look to the future.

Which brings us to this year’s edition. The underlying theme of this year is encapsulated in one title: “Sacri Monti, sacrilegi, sacripanti” (Sacred mountains, sacrileges, sacripanti). Much has been said about the relationship between the sacred and mountains, and so we have devoted an evening of readings and discussions to these themes.

What escapes us, however, is the reason why sacred sites such as mountains have also been the scenes of the worst sacrileges. We are not talking about crimes against what is sacred or the gods that live in the mountains, but crimes against the mountains themselves. The real sacrileges are deforestation, cable-car systems, property speculation, uncontrolled development of river basins, and the treatment of the mountains as a theme park.

Sacripanti is the humorous epithet that we have given the strange characters that populate this sacred world profaned by humanity. Sacripante is an argumentative character from Ludovico Ariosto’s book Orlando Furioso. This is why the Italian dictionary defines a sacripante as “a person of considerable build who shows off his strength”; it also lists derogatory terms such as “boaster” and “braggart”. A sacripante is also defined as a sly or very skilful person.

This last definition is possibly the most appropriate one for our context. Amidst the mountains live people of great skill who are sometimes boastful and quarrelsome, and if they are not of considerable build, then they have great agility and physical strength. The term sacropante would suit mountaineers and climbers such as George Mallory, Reinhold Messner, Bruno Trentin, Lino Lacedelli, Giusto Gervasutti and Gaston Rebuffat, as well as cyclists such as Fausto Coppi and Marco Pantani.

The films of the 58th TrentoFilmfestival will speak about people like this and much more besides.

Augusto Golin
Film Programming Director