In 2013, this fascinating, almost experimentally unclassifiable film by Gianfranco Rosi won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival. It is an enigmatic non-fiction essay, a docu-prose-poem about the peripheries of urban life in Rome. It would be great to see it in a double-bill with Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza. The GRA is the Grande Raccordo Anulare, or main ring road, the concrete ribbon that encircles Rome. The band Black Box Recorder sung that the English motorway system is beautiful and strange: Rosi feels the same way about the sacred GRA. His movie is intriguingly similar, in some ways, to London Orbital (2002), the film by Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair all about the M25. Rosi has gone out and interviewed the people that live and work around this circular margin. He shows two prostitutes who live in a campervan, an eel farmer, women who dance at a roadside cafe, construction workers reburying bodies, people who rent out their villas for parties (as in Sorrentino’s film) and an ambulance crew, who whizz eternally around the GRA. The effect is weirdly urban pastoral. It turns out to be a very beguiling, utterly uncliched love letter to Rome itself.
