TOMASO ARAMINIi (author of the film):

In my opinion, to make cinema can be divided in two approaches: the first one is to make cinema to entertain and to entertain means to put the spectator's consciousness to sleep, to contribute to his oppression; the second one is to make cinema to make the audience think, and to think means to awake and shape the social consciousness of the spectator up, to contribute to his potential emancipation. Since my first short films I chose the second approach. In this film more consciously than ever before I followed this approach, marrying my practice, my quest for another aesthetic to political struggle.

This film born from a suggestion from my mother: one of my fellow countryman wrote a book about my generation: the hopes of a different world, the struggles, the defeats, life that start all over again, you must read it: “The Lost Shoes- Holy Water and Red Brigades"". I read it in one breath, and few months later, I met Armando Lanza. An exquisite and profound person. It took the time of a coffee for me to understand that I wanted to tell his story, to realise that his story was in line with my idea of filmmaking practice. Armando was looking for a director to make a documentary about his story after two unfortunate attempts. He liked and trust me. We shook hands and started working.

I had to be faithful to the spirit of his book. To be faithful meant not simply to be true to his particular political experience, but in gen eral to the unaccounted memories and to the lost political heritage of that part of the Italian working class that in twenty years of history tried to bring a real change in Italian society via a socialist revolution.

I refused as much as possible writing and direction documentary techniques which seek to normalize the stories of their protagonists into spectacular narrative codes. Instead, I wrote and implemented an action plan, which consisted to collect and record footage containing testimony as it was lived, remembered, thought by my protagonist. The approach to achieve this plan was divided into three tactics of writing, shooting and editing: the first was to bring Armando back to the places decisive for his existential development, recording, through the shock of my eye, his reclamation of those places via his movements, gestures and words as they spontaneously arose. The second was to bring Armando together with former comrades who were decisive for his political development: that was made to research the general laws and trends that determined Italian history from the 60s to the 80s, in particular the different strategies for a socialist revolution that were theorised and practised in Italy at that time. I can summarise this process as the qualitative jump from the particular to the universal.

In this part of the action plan I gave to the contributors the following direction: to free oneself as much as possible from the simple description of one's own particular political experience; instead to reflect with distance on it so to bring the clean process of class struggle out, free from useless details, free from references that the spectator cannot understand. I identify the third part of the plan as the identity of the opposites: if I saw, I noticed that for today's viewer (as an average, hypothetical reference) there may have been difficulties of any sorts to follow the story I used and repurposed some mainstream narrative techniques in order to make the film more familiar. These techniques are well known: a referent of the story (the daughter), the use of voice over, the integration of archive material to contextualize the story, simple re-enactments (Lanza's general stalking), animations and illustrations created by Leonardo Carrano.

To conclude I would like to bring forward a general consideration I drew out from making this film. Revolutionary artistic practice is not simply political content enveloped in aesthetic form; it is, instead, the union of political content with an emotional experience, an aesthetic research for the truth of the film that creates the correct form. The junction point, in this film, was the shock of my eye during filming. I define shock of my eye that point of view where the emotion saturates to a point in which the truth of the moment experienced becomes visible and “frame-able”, establishing a sentimental connection between me and the filmed subjects, generating fragments of filmed experience; those fragments were edited so to seek the truth of the experience and the objectivity of a political process; the beauty of an encounter between me and the protagonists of the story and between me and history itself: Those who struggled for socialism demanded me so! "