ANDREA OCCHIPINTI, AGOSTINO FERRENTE, DONATELLA BOTTI
present

a film by  
AGOSTINO FERRENTE

If you want to see the blue palm trees of Piazza Vittorio, if you want to see the sea at Ostia in super8, if you want to see Rome, the city of Romeo and Juliet, if you want to hear “Mission Impossible” played on the cymbalon gypsy-style, if you want to see a Cuban practice yoga, an Indian on a white Vespa at the Coliseum without a helmet so as not to muss his hair, an Ecuadorian with pangs of love, a macho Arab wearing light pink, a man from Caserta sing in Hindi, an Argentinean who gets evicted from his garage, an Indian sitar player convinced he’s Uto Ughi, a New Yorker playing tables, a Senegalese girot who marries one of his students. If you want to learn how to say shit in German, Arab, Spanish, if you want to know how to sell a used car in Tunisia, if you want to know how a Rajasthani who has just arrived in Rome should offer an orange drink to a girl on their first date, if you want to learn to make Indian chai using jars as percussions too, and Senegalese cous-cous while Senegal beats France at the 2002 World Cup, if you want to know how to smoke a cigarette backwards or how to convince the city council to buy a red-light cinema, but above all if you want to sing a song without words…
If you want to know all these things, then you have to see the film “L'Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio”. You’ll love the world and the people who live in it.

The film-diary of the genesis of the Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, a band created by Mario Tronco, keyboard player for the group Avion Travel, and Agostino Ferrente. In a neighbourhood in Rome where Italians are an “ethnic minority”… they were able to group together musicians from all over the world.

Mario lives in Piazza Vittorio, heart of the historical neighborhood built during the time of Umberto I, the Esquilino, known for becoming the most multiethnic area in Rome where no less than sixty ethnicities live and work together and where ironically it is said that Italians have become “the minority”. Piano and keyboard player for Avion Travel, Mario is fascinated by the sounds and languages that, like music, rise through the courtyard and enter his home. His fascination becomes a dream: an orchestra.

Soon his dream meets and bonds with that of a documentary filmmaker who also lives in the Esquilino, Agostino Ferrente. Only one theatre remains in the neighborhood, the Apollo, one of the oldest and most beautiful in Italy which after years of vaudeville had become a porno movie theatre and was being threatened with becoming a bingo hall. His dream also had to do with the various cultures that live around the piazza: save the theatre and give it back to the neighborhood transforming it into a multi-disciplinary laboratory with films from all over the world and the intent of becoming a meeting point for all those living and working here.

These two dreams become the basis for the creation of the Associazione Apollo 11, made up of musicians, actors and artists from all sectors, intellectuals and also from local residents who love living here. The association fights in defense of the theater which they hope will become a theater of diversities in keeping with the image of the Esquilino.

On October 14 2002, on the street in front of the Cinema Apollo, the Association Apollo 11 put on a live concert to collect support in favor of saving the theater. This also marked the first take of a “work in progress” docu-musical that in the next five years would become a travel log describing the human and musical adventure Mario undertook in the desperate search for musicians born abroad and brought to Rome by destiny.

Among pleasant surprises and big delusions, an orchestra of about twenty musicians was created. Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Hindis, atheists… musicians who are able to get by with their music and others who have to wash windshields at traffic lights. There are self-taught artists who can’t read music and musicians with diplomas from conservatories. There are a few Italians and others who can’t even speak the language. Victims of right and left-wing regimes, those with pasts they would rather forget and those who miss their homes desperately. Musicians from far and wide… except China! It was impossible to get any adherence from a community which is difficult to approach but that is slowly taking over the Esquilino with its stock houses of made-in-China shoes and t-shirts springing up under the irate eyes of local resident committees, mostly right-wing, that regularly demonstrate against them.

Despite the normal amount of antagonism between the members of the orchestra and the financial difficulties within the association and despite the obstacles tied to the strict Bossi-Fini immigration law and all the bureaucratic problems immigrants have to face each day, the Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio gives voice and body to a harmonious diversity that has nothing to do with “ethnic music” because everyone in it is working towards another genre of music altogether. And not only do the various languages and instruments unite, in these past five years there have been mixed marriages and children born with a new shade of color.

View the trailer.