When the political world invades family life and work

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When the political world invades family life and work‍ ‍

Making a film while also engaging in a profound conversation with your father about family history is not an easy task. They accomplished it with humour, a lifelong characteristic of their relationship.‍ ‍

Graham Douglas‍ ‍

Anna Negri continues our conversation about growing up as the daughter of a famous political philosopher during the 1970s, the ‘years of lead’ in Italy, when her father was accused of being the mastermind behind the Reg Brigades.‍ ‍

Toni carried his own grief for the deaths of his father and brother which he had been forced to repress to keep their family functioning, and this self-containment was a source of strength for him when he was arrested under suspicion of terrorist involvement in the killing of Aldo Mori. But the same self-containment was exactly what made life so difficult for Anna, during her adolescence.‍ ‍

Their conversation, shown in her film at Doclisboa recently, is a struggle with their personal ghosts from that period, a work that is yet to be approached by the wider society in Italy, now under a right wing government.‍ Talking while making a film brought special difficulties but also allowed the filmmaker to see their characters from a distance and to play with different ways of editing the sequences.‍‍ ‍

Going back to his early life, he said that he had this split between his feelings of grief that he could not express and the need to function as if everything was normal. He had to repress them in the same way you did when you were growing up. Because of the situation with Toni, you couldn't just have a normal, relaxed relationship with your friends. In his case he calls it the duplicity of resistance, giving it a positive spin.‍ ‍

I put it in the film because it was like, through my childhood, I could understand his childhood. It's not like you choose something, something happens to you, and you find a coping mechanism. Having both experienced these things, we could be empathic, one with the other.‍‍ ‍

But that was more difficult for him?‍ ‍

Yes, it was. He was older, he was a father, I was a daughter, I was missing him. What happened was so enormous, that you can't discuss it as if we were like normal people who suddenly stopped talking to one another.‍‍ ‍

Another theme in the film is identity. For you as a teenager, it's a case of forming a kind of social identity. And there was a crisis for him when he was subjected to this media blitz, accusing him of being the secret leader of the Red Brigades. He suddenly felt thrust into a parallel universe. So, you could identify with that.‍ ‍

Of course, we also were thrown into another world.‍ When people want me to talk about him being accused of being a leader of the Red Brigades, I still start to feel that everybody is looking at me. This is to tell you how deep this thing goes, and it's been more than 40 years.‍‍ ‍

The film was made over three years, and you had many hours of footage: I’m interested in the effects of editing. You were talking about when you were 17 and feeling the split between yourself and friends, and then the scene that came straight after that was where you're sitting around a table talking about alienation, and I wondered if you were guiding the viewer towards making a connection.‍ ‍

We've been in the editing for a year, so we tried every possible combination of the scenes, and we soon abandoned any rational way of sequencing. You could also say that there are all the different generations, I show some friends that I filmed when I was about my son's age, and then that connects me also with my son. And then at the end of the scene, he says to me, “You're doing the same thing to me”.‍ Every time you put a scene next to another, it makes a new sense. And you have no idea how many beautiful scenes we left out.‍‍ ‍

The audience, especially earlier on in the film, and again when you are pushing him in his wheelchair in Venice were laughing a lot. ‍

That's great. Yes, and then we're arguing again.‍‍ ‍

I imagine that a lot of the scenes the audience thought were funny, were far from funny for you.‍ ‍

No, both me and my father shared a lot of humour, even in tragic situations. That's something that accompanies us.‍ It doesn't show so much in the film because we were both concerned about how the film would come out.‍ I say, “We’re here talking because we’re a family, and he goes “a family??” and waves his hand. I and my cameraman used to call him Scrooge, the Dickens character, because especially with me he’s like an old man, angry with everything.‍‍ ‍

For part of the film, you were director as well as being in the film. What was that like, switching of roles?‍ ‍

It was great, that was really the moment where I do feel I've been courageous to put myself in the film. If I wanted some intimacy with him, I had to be in the film as well, not in a hierarchical position, speaking from behind the camera. ‍I must tell you that when I was on camera, I was completely spontaneous. I was not trying to manipulate the situation. I was sincerely trying to understand things and have a discussion.‍ But then there is also me, the director that's organising. During the editing I would see myself like a character. I finally understood how people can direct and be acting in a film, because you are just a narrative device, a character that represents certain things. Sometimes I would speak about ‘her’ in the third person.‍‍ ‍

He had to leave for France; he was away for another 15 years. How did your career develop during that period?‍ ‍

I went to film school. I did the things that a young woman does. I could be anonymous in Holland and the UK; I didn't even tell my friends my story. I wanted a break from it all.‍‍ I came back and a first feature is a big deal. But I got thrown back into all that mess. And he felt like I wasn't supporting him politically, but we’d hardly spoken during those 15 years. It's all symbolic of a conflict between ideology and life.‍ And the pressure of living a political life and having around us people that are trying to live their own lives. ‍He had good reasons to come back to Italy, but I also had good reasons to want to make my film in peace.‍ ‍

I think it's important not to judge your characters, because that leaves the audience able to make their own judgement.‍‍ ‍

He says it's something that you didn't realise at the time, but it was Paola who pushed him to leave Venice, and he wonders: “if I hadn't got involved in all this activism, I could have been a kind of famous professor”.‍ ‍

That's very ironic, I don't think he's actually considering that possibility.‍ He says that my mum is like Eve who threw him out of Eden.‍‍ ‍

There was a short scene of a fox in a tiny cage going round and round. ‍

That's found footage. I actually had a dream where I felt like an animal in a cage.‍‍ ‍

It seemed that there was a reconciliation at the end of the film.‍ ‍

We agreed to disagree.‍‍ ‍

Is there anything that you want to be in this interview that I've left out?‍ ‍

That there is a real taboo in Italy about coming to terms with that period. It's only been done through the work of individuals who went through it. It's a real pity that there hasn't been any kind of political or cultural reconciliation. I think you should write about the film and say, “go and see it”!‍‍ ‍

Future plans? ‍

Reality is really complex at the moment, so I'm reading a lot, and I have to find a key to speak about it. Where the world is going. It goes through the personal lives of people. How we are indoctrinated every day through psychology, through Instagram, through everything. It's not as simple as it was before.

The interview with images and links was first published here:

‍ ‍https://theprisma.co.uk/2025/11/24/when-the-political-world-invades-family-life-and-work/