Fiorenzo Serra spent the last years of his life putting together his massive “audiovisual encyclopedia of Sardinia”. Meticulous and active despite unrelenting adversity, Serra re-organized his papers and films in order leave behind critical editions of his documentaries and the 1965 full-length film L’ultimo pugno di terra. Unfortunately, Serra’s time ran out too quickly, and he stopped working with us on the audiovisual history of Sardinia when he passed away in September 2005. We have been committed to finding and restoring materials for L’ultimo pugno di terra for almost three years; it was incumbent on us to use the same care and passion as Fiorenzo, conscious as we are of this film’s significance for Sardinia. Shot between 1960 and 1962, L’ultimo pugno di terra was completed in 1964, but it did not receive approval from Sardinia’s regional authority, which wanted a documentary celebrating the regional development plan “Piano di Rinascita”. Despite being awarded at the 1966 Festival dei Popoli, the film never received distribution and, as a result, was broken down for making a series of short documentaries that were shown in theaters. During this time some of the negative was lost, and the restoration today had to use in part salvaged positive prints.

Giuseppe Pilleri, Cineteca Sarda

L’ultimo pugno di terra’s restoration sprang from both a desire and duty to bring back to life the original film that Fiorenzo Serra had conceived of and intended to make. It was therefore to be an important project of salvaging and reconstructing the film’s “master” edition. The film’s original vastness is what made restoring L’ultimo pugno di terra complex and challenging. The work suffered from numerous interventions that threatened its integrity. In fact, the film’s original negative was divided up in order to create a series of new documentaries. The large number of prints collected, their fairly good state of preservation and the detailed extra-filmic documentation available were determining factors in choosing the methodology to apply to this particular restoration. Once collecting and studying the prints was completed, we opted for using modern digital technology for the film’s entire reconstruction. All the useful material for reconstruction was processed following a complete digital workflow with 2K (2048X1556) resolution up until finally restoring the images to film through film recording. This methodology enabled us to work specifically on a series of problems that compromised the work’s entirety and to accurately reconstruct the original. The restoration was made with the support of the Società Umanitaria – Cineteca Sarda at the L’Immagine Ritrovata lab in Bologna.

Laura Pavone and Davide Pozzi