Zona Monumentale

Zona Monumentale is a film built inside a place of extraordinary historical, artistic and iconographic value: the Circolo Unione of Lucera. This monumental space, an ancient point of reference for the notables of the community and location for the cinema, expresses meaning in particular for one characteristic: it’s being a place that has remained unchanged over time. In fact, since it was founded during fascism until today, the Club has maintained its furnishings, its spaces and its customs. A condition of stasis which becomes a sort of metaphor for the condition of inner Italy, in particular the south: apparently immobile and closed in on themselves, in reality these places are at the same time like community laboratories in which forms of aggregation alternatives to those of the neoliberal monoculture of hyper-performative time and the full identification of life with work. In these spaces a meridian path to existence is still possible, because idleness as a value is still tolerated. Unconsciously they become pockets of resistance.
In detail, the film proceeds through situations, significant moments in which the spaces of the Club are at the same time the unifying element of the narrative and the true protagonist. In fact, the rooms of the Club interact with a series of presences that describe the space through their own sensitivity, providing a new decoding with their crossing, in a sort of community cinema experiment, in which the energies of the territory that in this space for many repelling aspects have never found their space, now they cross it to leave their mark.
This narrative mechanism culminates with the session in which a young medium recalls the spirit of Massimo Troisi, who set his Le vie del Signore sono finite here 35 years ago, and with whose spirit these rooms are still imbued. Surrounded by men who carelessly play cards and billiards, the medium asks the Neapolitan author questions and through the cards she interprets his answers. In this sense the film also wants to be an extreme and paradoxical homage to the Neapolitan artist. A tribute totally free of the hagiographic rhetoric that often surrounds his figure.