The section on 1915 this year focuses on migration as one of its special themes. The film Il jockey della morte is a tribute to a particular migration phenomenon that saw talented European actors and directors choosing Italy as their base, even if temporarily. In addition to Gaston Velle, hired by Cines in Rome in 1906, Segundo de Chomón, working with Itala in 1912, and Adelardo Arias, who signed on with Ambrosio in Turin in 1915, a well-known name of international cinema showed up in Italy in the mid 1910s: the acclaimed Danish actor, cinematographer, screenwriter and metteur en scène Alfred Lind. With his reputation preceding him, Lind made five films in Italy as director and actor, three of which between 1914 and 1916 and the other two in the 1920s, and founded his own production company in Milan in 1923: Lind Film.
Il jockey della morte is probably the best cinematic work of Alfred Lind’s period in Italy. Shot mostly in the heart of Milan, the film moves between the circus world, which the director narrates ably and poetically, and the metropolitan city. The main character, who wears a skeleton costume of the masked hero or the elegant clothes of an English gentleman, is at the center of a whirlwind of adventures in which breathtaking car chases, wild train rides, catastrophic bridge explosions are a modernist translation of equally dangerous feats performed by the circus artists.

Giovanni Lasi