For a generation of movie fans, the Italian protest song Bella Ciao is the anthemic cornerstone of Netflix’s gripping Spanish crime series Money Heist. The catchy little ditty runs through the popular show, casting the band of robbers as romantic outsiders: the rebellious heirs to the brave partisans who fought Mussolini’s fascists. Filmmaker Giulia Giapponesi presents a detailed exploration in her new documentary – digging deep into the history of this this enduring anthem for resistance.
It mixes social documentary with art and culture history across the decades, interspersed with archive footage of renditions of the song, blended with newsreel with infographics. Artists, musicians, scholars, and revolutionaries discuss how the simple yet powerful tune has come to hold such power over the imagination. Author Carlo Pestelli calls Bella Ciao a “song that travels easily” but turns to French thinker Claude Lévi-Straus and his assertion that “the real sense of a myth is found in its final reception” for evidence of its mythic status.
Perhaps most fascinating in the film are the contemporary reflections of people connected to the partisan movement who track the song’s evolution. Giacomo Scaramuzzo, a 98-year-old resistance fighter recalls singing the song but only after the Second World War. Another expert points to a rendition at a 1960s folk festival by Giovanna Daffini, who had learned the song as a rice picker – a performance which triggered a national scandal.
It remained a regular favourite at Italian political rallies throughout the 1990s, has been covered many times and is a standard for Left-leaning movements across the world – from Kurdish fighters to Italian rockers against Berlusconi. Given the cultural and historic scope of the documentary, it is relatively short at 90 minutes and could easily devote more time to the subject. Still, it makes for a fascinating journey through a hymn of resistance adapted and loved by revolutionaries of every age.
Bella Ciao was presented at the Cinecittà Italian Docs Festival on 25 June.
