The best Sonia Bergamasco’s documentary movies

In a stirring blend of archival footage, fictional recreations, interviews, and animation, the film delves into the story of Italy’s ‘Unknown Soldier’. November 4, 2021, in fact, is the hundredth anniversary of the burial of the Unknown Soldier in the Altare della Patria in Rome. Thanks to a collaboration with the Ministry of Defense, the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, the city of Aquileia, and the Istituto Luce Cinecittà, this film reconstructs the events that led up to that event in 1921

The relations between Parma and cinema were so strong for almost the whole of the twentieth century that this city became an early laboratory of ideas and theories on cinema and a set chosen by some of the greatest Italian authors and beyond. Furthermore, a considerable number of directors, actors, screenwriters and set designers were born in Parma who have made their way internationally, testifying to the fact that in this small city in Northern Italy there was a decidedly cinematic air. Red armchairs takes up the thread of this story, wondering why, unique among the Italian provincial cities, Parma has given so much to the cinema, accompanying the viewer on a journey backwards that from the first projections of the Lumière cinema reaches the ultramodern experience of new multiplexes. During this journey we will meet the characters who created the conditions for this diffusion of cinematographic culture in Parma.