Newsgroup: it.cultura.storia
Titolo: NY Times: “Draquila: Italy Trembles”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/world/europe/13rome.html
Critical Cannes Film Angers Italian Official
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
ROME — Movie stars, politicians and sundry glitterati mugged for the
red-carpet cameras on Wednesday at the start of the Cannes Film
Festival. But Sandro Bondi, the Italian culture minister, was not
among them.
Mr. Bondi, national coordinator of the majority party, People of
Freedom, announced over the weekend that he would skip Cannes, the
world’s most prestigious film festival, because the program included
“Draquila: Italy Trembles,” a documentary on the 2009 earthquake in
L’Aquila. The film is propaganda, he charged, and “insults the truth
and the entire Italian population.”
The person it insults most is Mr. Bondi’s boss, Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi, and Mr. Bondi’s absence is again raising questions about
Mr. Berlusconi’s tolerance for criticism as well as his ability,
through control of the Italian media, to crush dissent.
Directed by the satirist Sabina Guzzanti, “Draquila” accuses Mr.
Berlusconi’s government and its cronies of capitalizing on the post-
earthquake reconstruction to misuse public money while trampling over
urban planning restrictions and civil rights and manipulating public
opinion. It also alleges that Mr. Berlusconi tried to transform the
Civil Protection Agency, which was put in charge of the rescue and
reconstruction efforts, into a multitentacled private enterprise with
practically limitless powers, operating at his bidding.
In February, the agency was drawn into a broad investigation of
corruption in the awarding of public works contracts.
Ms. Guzzanti, who has been for years virtually barred from television
in Italy, says Italian democracy is at stake.
L’Aquila provided the perfect setting “to explain what’s going on in
the country today,” she said.
Mr. Bondi’s boycott of Cannes was greeted by critics as evidence of a
growing authoritarianism under Mr. Berlusconi.
This merely “bears out the idea, already widely diffuse in Europe,
that our government considers dissent not a tiresome but inevitable
consequence of power, but an insupportable insult to the sanctity of
its mission,” wrote the author and satirist Michele Serra in the left-
leaning Rome newspaper La Repubblica.
Mr. Berlusconi, who owns the country’s three top private television
stations and oversees the broadcaster RAI, does not hide his distaste
for public disparagement. He has sued journalists who have criticized
him and has accused the news media of twisting facts to suit a leftist
agenda.
On Saturday, Italian newspapers reported that the prime minister had
been outraged that sketches satirizing the government had appeared on
a program on the state channel RAI 3. Afterward, managers at the
publicly financed broadcaster were called to task, the press said.
“Given the current political climate, an up-and-coming author might be
inclined to self-censure, and that isn’t good for creativity,” said
Serena Dandini, host of the show “Parla Con Me,” which she described
as a “cross between ‘Saturday Night Live’ and a poor man’s Oprah.”
With decades of experience under the belt, she and her staff would not
bow to outside pressure, she vowed, “though we have felt under fire.”
Ms. Guzzanti — who says she has not worked in television since 2003
because of her outspokenness — pointed out that she had had to produce
the documentary herself. “No one was going to give me money,” she said.

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Bondo poi ha fatto una figuraccia e un'ottima pubblicità al Film-
verità
Vdm

 verità
allora dovreste essere soddisfatti, no?