9×10 novanta is a film in nine episodes with nine different Italian directors made in celebration of Istituto Luce’s 90th anniversary. Each film is ten minutes long and uses images from Archivio Luce.
In an attempt to evoke provincial and rural Italy, we created a journey through images of farm life, quotidian and exceptional moments of a bygone society, a society of humans in close contact with the earth, according to an archeology of human memory that regards us all on a deep level.
The peasant world respected our landscape, drew it on its admirable ruins and across centuries had furrowed its history. Carlo Levi taught us that this poor and miserable world rested upon centuries, millennia of substance and meaning, made of rules and harmony. We have chosen several excerpts from his book Un volto che ci somiglia in which his optimistic outlook reads in things, spaces and the faces of men the poetic image of a pilgrim people, a choral world with its values of harmony, pain, humanity and community.

Pietro Marcello and Sara Fgaier