Futura: a youth-focused anthropological study from three modern greats of Italian cinema

Three of the most esteemed directors in current Italian cinema got together to make Futura, a documentary that the opening credits describe as a “collective film”. While the individual works of Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro, 2018) and Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden, 2019) tend towards the fable-like, and those of Francesco Munzi (Black Souls, 2014) stick more closely to realism, the filmmakers share an interest in portraying their country’s social realities by tracing developments from the 20th century until today. It’s thus fitting that their collaboration should be conceived of as a carrying-on of experiments in cinéma verité from the time of Italy’s economic miracle.

Mario Soldati’s Chi legge? Viaggio lungo il Tirreno (1960) and Luigi Commencini’s I bambini e noi (1970) – serials that aired on the public broadcaster RAI – are quoted directly in the form of clips, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore (1964) is discussed in one of the many interviews that make up Futura. Like their avowed inspirations, the co-directors travel across Italy, talking to people from various social backgrounds to construct a contemporary mosaic of the country. Their exclusive focus is on adolescents on the cusp of adulthood, whom they ask questions pertaining to their future with the aim of conveying the aspirations and prospects of the youth in Italy today.

It’s a subject that proves too vast and vaguely defined to be satisfactorily explored in 105 minutes. (To compare, Soldati and Commencini stretched their respective investigations over eight and six episodes; Pasolini stuck to feature length, but he set out to systematically verify a thesis about conformism in the national mentality.) Filmed in groups and framed in close-up when speaking, the youths are uniformly charismatic and their reflections always engaging. Unfortunately, the film’s structure only grants them space for statements that can’t help but remain superficial. The interviewees are too numerous (the credits list several hundred names) and their selection is indiscriminate to the point of seeming haphazard, ranging from cattle farmers to students at an elite university and second-generation Romani immigrants. The only apparent organisation of the testimonies is a gradual and irregular movement upwards on the social scale, though the contrast doesn’t reveal much beyond the expected disparities in education and professional outlook.

Shot in 16mm, capturing the youths and the landscapes of Italy bathed in idyllic sunshine, Futura is a ravishing, thoroughly pleasurable viewing experience. The ultimate impression, however, is that aesthetics took precedence over insight and that, surfaces aside, there is little particularly Italian or contemporary about the resulting portrait.

► Futura is in UK cinemas now.