Parentesi baltica

BAAC CONFERENCE 2022 ABSTRACT

Giorgio Ruggeri
Lithuanian Institute of History

In the years between the two world wars, the Baltic States financed stays for Italian journalists. Governments aimed at instructing them, so as to exercise a certain control over the countries' image in the Italian press, by promoting their national master narratives and tackling 'false information'. But this idea had a limitation: it did not consider the journalists' subjective gaze.

Parentesi baltica is an experimental documentary that examines such perspectives by recreating the experience of several Italian reporters who visited Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania between 1920 and 1940. The film’s narrative experiment is based on the arbitrary combination of two different types of archival materials: A) footage filmed in the Baltic States during the interwar period, coming from from different collections across Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, USA, Poland, and Germany; B) articles about the Baltic States written in the main Italian newspapers of that time, that have been interpreted by voice over actors.

The dialogue between images and words creates a new narration, where archival footage acquires unexpected meanings. The surprising accounts contrast with the selected film scenes, which focus on the ordinary: urban and rural landscapes; daily life in cities, towns and villages; common people looking at the camera. Visual fragments of a reality that would soon be wiped out by the violence of WWII, the Holocaust, and Soviet occupation. The project, written and directed by Giorgio Ruggeri, is supervised by the Lithuanian Institute of History, partially financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, and supported by the BAAC.