Icarus flies in non-places

The red of a veil on Zelinda's head spans the seventy years narrated by Invelle (Italy and Switzerland, 2023, 82'). Whether you write it with a capital or lower case, it is history, the one staged almost exclusively in black and white by the animated film by Simone Massi and his co-writers Luca Briasco, Assunta Ceccarani, Julia Gromskaya and Nello Massi.

We are around 1920. In a place in the mountains of the Marches, and indeed in a non-place of exploitation and misery - this in dialect means invelle, non-place -, the Great War brought further misery, to which were added first the Spanish flu epidemic and then the violence of rising fascism. It fell to little Zelinda to take the place of her mother, who died with 'lungs full of blood', in caring for the family. And it is the colour of her blood that blossoms on her head. Together with the yellow of an egg yolk and the green of a leaf, the red seems to want to prevail over the greys and blacks of the drawings with which Massi gives movement to his peasants and labourers. Vexed and reduced to silence, their tiny stories are the painful reflection of History - of that history we love to write with a capital letter,
mostly with the advantage of forgetting the many who
suffer it.

More than twenty years later, in 1943, that red is still glowing in the background. In the foreground is the story of another little girl, Teresa, Zelinda's daughter. And after her, in 1978, that of her son emerges. Common to all three is the looming of History, first the fascist dictatorship, then the partisan war and finally the kidnapping and assassination of Moro. A looming that weighs down on the non-place and its tiny (and minimal) stories like a sum of distant facts.

Or like a weight on the wings of Icarus - whose myth is evoked by a storyteller with the voice of the talented Mimmo Cuticchio - and his desire to fly high over the sea. And Icarus is called Zelinda's nephew, who has never seen the sea and who seeks it as a promise of freedom - a promise already alive in the red that stubbornly interrupts and denies the greys and blacks of the invelle.

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