Berlinguer - La grande ambizione

Enrico Berlinguer was the Secretary of the most important Communist party of the Western world, with over one million seven hundred thousand members and more than twelve million voters, united by the great ambition of achieving socialism within a democracy. The story of a man and a people for whom life and politics, private and collective, were irremediably bound together.

COMMENTARY
La grande ambizione – The Great Ambition – comes from a phrase by Antonio Gramsci who defined it as indissoluble from the collective good. And it was to the collectivity, to the teeming city squares of the 1970s that the then-secretary of the Communist Party turned, in his attempt to build socialism within a democracy. Opening with the reels of the 1973 Chilean coup d'état Chile and ending with the images of Berlinguer’s funeral in Rome in 1984, the film is dedicated to the years in which Enrico Berlinguer attempted to establish the historic compromise. Andrea Segre has woven the portrait of a politician filled with humanity and reserve, of an unshakable man, introverted, highly intelligent and beloved by the common people.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
There have been many documentaries, books and essays made about Berlinguer, but until now no one had ever tried to make a fiction film to reconstruct his world and his people “from inside”, during what were probably the most complex and decisive years of his political experience. I decided to rise to this challenge and there were two key elements that helped me get this far: on the one hand respect for Enrico’s seriousness and sobriety, on the other the decision to never imitate, but always try to understand. To talk about politics not with slogans and symbols, but by diving into the lives of those who feel it is an essential part of existence. My choice of Elio Germano as the protagonist was crucial, because I knew that he too would have worked to understand and not to represent.