Out from under the years of lead

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Most peoples’ lives are lived within social, legal and political structures that are hard to challenge, but when those structures fracture and invade the life of a family it is like an emotional earthquake.  A new Italian film portrays a personal struggle to understand the past and challenges the political taboo on discussing that period. ‍ ‍

Graham Douglas‍ ‍

Anna Negri is a filmmaker and the daughter of the famous Italian philosopher and political theorist Antonio Negri. In 1979, when she was 14, their family was hit by a political and mediatic tsunami when he was falsely accused of being the secret mastermind of the Red Brigades who had recently kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, the leader of the governing Democrazia Cristiana party (DC). The Red Brigades get all the media attention, but many bombings and terrorist attacks were carried out by right-wing groups, and Prime Minister Andreotti was accused of abandoning Moro to his fate, which would have been a convenient way of smearing the Left.‍ ‍

Her new film Toni, mio padre (Toni, my father), shown at the Venice Film Festival, is more than an account of this family trauma and its impact on a teenage girl developing her adult identity. It is a conversation with her father who died aged 90 in 2023, in which they try to understand each other and the times they lived through in sometimes dramatic arguments. She says that he speaks the language of politics while hers is the language of emotions, and this is a struggle for empathy for each other still scarred by those events. ‍ ‍

Their relationship was full of conflicting motives, philosophies and opinions, feelings of admiration for him compounded with abandonment, when she was most vulnerable. It has universal appeal for its portrayal of a family invaded by larger events, whether they are political or criminal.‍‍ ‍

After fleeing to France for 14 years he returned in 1997 to serve out a 12-year sentence for moral responsibility in a hold up, and he was released in 2003. (He was acquitted on the Moro case). By coincidence Anna returned to Italy that year to make a film, only to be plunged again into a media storm connecting her to her father.‍ ‍

But there is a lot of humour in the film, and sometimes in our conversation for The Prisma after it was shown at DocLisboa recently.‍‍ ‍

It's a magnificent film. In the Q&A, one of the women said it was very courageous, and I think it was courageous also for Toni. ‍ ‍

Neither of us felt that courageous, we just felt authentic.‍‍ ‍

You said it was a struggle for you.‍ ‍

It was about being free of a really heavy past.‍‍ ‍

You wrote a book, why did you feel the need to make a film as well?‍ ‍

Because the book is very much about how I experienced that story as a child and as a young girl. And this started the film as a way to collect the memories of my father.‍ ‍

But then we kept on going back to the time he was arrested, because it was the most bonding thing between us. I realised as I was shooting the film that what was interesting was the relationship between us, because that was the device to tell the story.‍‍ ‍

The whole film is about the relationship, isn't it?‍ ‍

Through the relationship we also tell the story of what happened to us.‍ Maybe he didn't expect to be put so much on the spot about personal things. He didn't realise that what impacted him also had a huge impact on us, because his own subjective experience of what had happened was so big that he took for granted that for us it wasn't as big. And we were young; we didn't have the tools to deal with it.‍‍ ‍

He said he was inside this wave and couldn't do what he should have been able to do. And you said too much happened in too short a time. All these institutions were being challenged, including the Communist Party. bHow do you feel the effect of 1968 and the 70s in Italy, now? Has that been digested?‍ ‍

No, it's still a completely taboo subject. Those years are dismissed as the years of terrorism, Gli anni di piombo (the years of lead), which was just a way to criminalise dissent, but a lot of social changes happened in those years. ‍‍ ‍

I was talking to some Italian friends in 1991 about why Andreotti’s corrupt government suddenly came to an end after such a long time. They said obviously because the Berlin Wall came down, the Americans were no longer scared of communism, so they stopped protecting him.‍ ‍

But before that, so many people were in the streets from ‘68 to ‘79; everybody was trying to defend democracy because we have so many examples of perverted secret services that planted bombs and things like that. For us, you don't even need to mention it because it's so implanted in everybody's awareness. There had been fascist terrorists that were protected by the secret service, even given what to do by the CIA.‍‍ ‍

You were also angry with your mother for not defending you and not supporting you enough at that time, and she agreed with his politics. But, when it came to a crunch, you were on her side and not his.‍ ‍

I think the film displays all these conflicts in a very poetic way, where everybody can understand that we are always very ambivalent about everybody in families.‍ I'm pissed off with my mum because she was so attached to my father, even though he left her.‍ The film is about how large-scale history impacts on small people's history. That translates into relationships breaking up, and you could say it's because people are mean or because there are bigger things going through them. Either way, there is a toll.‍‍ ‍

You seem to get on very well with his future girlfriends and wives.I was surprised because it was him who left your mother.‍ ‍

In between my mother and this woman, there's been another two wives, so on the scale of all those years…‍ ‍

What struck you about the film?‍‍ ‍

What attracted me? Well, it's not exactly attraction. ‍ ‍

I said ‘struck’.‍‍ ‍

I must get a hearing aid…‍ ‍

I got drawn into the powerful emotional things that were going on. And scenes where you're really showing your anger to him. It's kind of universal, it's easy to identify with. Another example would be, where somebody, maybe typically the father, the husband, gets involved in crime and ends up in prison for X number of years. It destroys; it punishes the family who did nothing wrong. I found those kinds of emotional impacts very strong.‍ ‍

At one point you said that you speak the language of emotions, and he speaks the language of politics.  When you were talking about the feminist women who were campaigning for paid housework, he said he agreed, but he didn't agree with the way they're doing it. Because they're disturbing their habits. I thought, “How can he be saying that?”‍ ‍

For him at that time it was something new. He grew up in a male-dominated culture, and then suddenly these women are protesting. They were probably a bit younger than him, from an academic world; so, he understood them intellectually, but they challenged his habits.‍ Those habits were that men were dominating women. And for me that was a documentary moment, that I was trying to explain what those women must have felt in that moment when suddenly they understood this. He had a lot of indignation about the inequality between workers, but he was not at all touched by the inequality between sexes. And that was surprising for me, being from another generation.‍ Militants in the movement, the men, were reproducing the same male-female relationships of the people that they were opposing. The interview with images and links can be found here where it was first published:

‍ ‍https://theprisma.co.uk/2025/11/17/out-from-under-the-years-of-lead/