Lucia Festival \ Events

Lavoro vincitore Premio Lucia 2024 : Opere
Ascolto in presenza dell’autore

‘They wished me a great long life,’ says Giovanni Farina. Until 31 December 9999. Giovanni Farina was a lifer.

This is a journey into the existence of a survivor. Giovanni Farina survived the life sentence to which he was sentenced. Giovanni Farina has survived his legend, that of the impregnable bandit Farina, indicated as the mastermind of the kidnapping of Giuseppe Soffiantini, one of the last and most sensational kidnappings, in 1998. He was told he would never see his mountains again, the Calvana Mountains, and asked if he had not realised that he was going to die in prison.

These Calvana Mountains, where Giovanni Farina grew up, are the mountains where the filmmaker and documentary filmmaker Giovanni Cioni returned to live, precisely in the years of the Soffiantini kidnapping, when the bandit Farina was thought to be hiding – and he was impregnable.

It is in these mountains, in a house not far from his abandoned home, that the two Giovanni meet for this conversation – and they meet again on the very day Giovanni finishes serving his sentence. The day he would be free.
He would be, he says.

An aural and cinematic journey – of sound images like reminiscences.
The words retrace a life, relive it. They take us far back in time – his childhood as a Sardinian shepherd in Tuscany, the climate of suspicion and criminalisation with which he clashed, his first arrests andescapes, the dispersed family.

The words take us far into space – to the jungles of Venezuela, to Australia, to the cave of the long years of isolation. The words – in the years of imprisonment to survive, Giovanni began to use words, to write texts, stories, poems, of a poignant splendour to fight against the darkness. In Giovanni’s words there is a stubbornness to life, a lost life to be found.