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PRODUCTION TEAM
Director :
Renzo Martinelli
Script :
Renzo Martinelli, Pietro Calderoni
Photography :
Blasco Giurato
Editor :
Massimo Quaglia
Cast :
Daniel Auteuil, Michel Serrault, Laura Morante, Leo Guillota, Anita Caprioli, Jorge Perugorr�a, Philippe Leroy
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VAJONT
On the night of October 9, 1963, a huge landslide from Mount Toc in the heart of the Italian Dolomites, careened down into the Vajont reservoir below, causing it to overflow the world's highest hydro-electric dam. A 260-metre high wave was generated and in the ensuing disaster five towns in the valley were washed away and over 2000 people died. The disaster was previously the subject of an acclaimed one-man theatre piece by performance artist Marco Paolini, but the main inspiration for the screenplay was the reporting (articles and a book) by journalist Tina Merlin. The film's story spans the period from 1959, when against expert and local advice ("Do you know why this mountain is called Toc? Because in our region toc means something rotten, crumbly"), construction was begun on the dam, through 1963, when the residents of Vajont paid a terrible price for official incompetence and corruption. As a commission of inquiry later revealed, the chief engineers of the project, Semenza and Biadene had commissioned a geological report on the site but when the report's findings suggested a potential for disaster, the engineers simply buried it. Today it is the reservoir itself that lies buried, entrenched in millions of cubic metres of clay, a 260-metre high monument to human greed.
Renzo Martinelli
Before directing VAJONT, Renzo Martinelli directed THE WATERBABY (1994) and PORZUS (1997). The purpose of his film, Martinelli asserts, was "to create a memorial that will make us think about unpopular issues. Vajont was a terrible tragedy, the worst kind of chain reaction that we have not learned anything from... The thousands of signals that were purposely ignored when they could have avoided all that horror... (and) the shameful events that followed: the insulting amounts of money given out as compensation, neverending court hearings, non-existent sentences, the most recent of which dates back to last August -- only 37 years after the disaster!"
August 29, 2002 • 14:00:00 • PARISIEN • P4.29.3 •
August 30, 2002 • 21:30:00 • PARISIEN • P4.30.6 •
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