A short produced by Documento Film and shot in the Carso region near Trieste during the Christmas holidays of 1959. Its director believed it lost until three years ago when yours truly had the good fortune to discover a 35mm copy in excellent condition conserved in the archives of the Cineteca di Bologna. Giraldi, at the time a former film journalist who had moved to Rome and was working as an assistant director, produced an extremely personal, bittersweet ‘western’ fresco about his homeland. Through indelible images, Giuseppe Pinori – later a cinematographer for Nanni Moretti, Marco Tullio Giordana and the Taviani brothers – immortalised the hard, daily work of the fisherman and peasants of Santa Croce/Sveti Križ. A village experiencing rapid depopulation, squeezed between the border with Tito’s Yugoslavia and the plunging slopes of the Gulf of Trieste. The renowned Triestine critic Callisto Cosulich, who had also already moved to the capital, composed a lyrical voiceover commentary for the film.

Lorenzo Codelli

In this documentary, as well as in his magnificent fiction films, Carso is a veritable protagonist. I cannot forget the splendid Un anno di scuola, a film I love dearly and which I watched come into existence. Carso, for both Giraldi and I, became an irreplaceable character in the history of this period: a rugged land, like that of Scipio Slataper, which contrasts with the ‘old Europe’ of the city, where the kids address each other in polite and formal tones. Watching this documentary, I cannot fail to recall the magnificent Carso, which appears in a film that I consider one of Giraldi’s authentic masterpieces, La frontiera. A beautiful film, perhaps his best.

Claudio Magris