No Man's Land: documents and revelations of space in "Sacro GRA" (Gianfranco Rosi, 2013) and "Nomadland" (Chloé Zhao, 2020)

Abstract

Our path has chosen films capable of punctuating the discussion about material difficulty and resilience in extreme situations imposed on citizens in spaces significantly modified by new working and survival conditions. We start from the narrative choices of Italian cinema, with Gianni Amelio and his problematization of migrations to reach the experimental meaning in the documentary by Gianfranco Rosi, skilled in reviewing the Roman periphery to bring the excluded life to the foreground. Chloé Zhao profits from Jessica Bruder's book and directs the film that updates the anthropological and audiovisual dimensions through individuals erased from civil existence. Like Sacro GRA, Nomadland tells stories of people forced to occupy uninhabitable territories in their own country. Emphasizing original sequences through immanent analysis we investigate how the concepts of territory and space are overturned by the composition of the films. The approaches ask for new ways of filming and request from the spectator an urgent review of political, economic, and social concepts as well as a renewal of the outlook at the films in order to visualize in depth the spaces occupied by the invisible, the limits and the ways of overstepping the working conditions in the stories and in the shooting itself.