13/02/2025 - The animated film by Giovanni Columbu tells the story of two teenagers in search of freedom in 1940s Sardinia

Presented in the Harbour section of the latest edition of IFFR, Balentes [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is the latest effort by Giovanni Columbu, seven years after Surbiles [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. Like all of Columbu’s films, and like the majority of films by Sardinian filmmakers, this film is set on Sardinia, a statistic that seems banal but which says a lot about the weight that cultural and geographic identity has on the mind of artists from the island. In Giovanni Columbu’s case then, a director who once was the president of the Partito Sardo d’Azione, Sardinianness is almost an obligation. And Balentes takes it upon itself tto talk about a certain kind of Sardinianness, not always noble, already from the ambiguous title which denotes both courage and arrogance. Columbu follows the footsteps of the great writers who have made it an epic land, first and foremost Salvatore Satta and Grazia Deledda, followed by Marcello Fois and Michela Murgia, the latter with the arduous task of adapting tradition to the contemporary moment.

Thus Balentes, an animated film which has, amongst its stylistic traits, a strong pictorial component, swoops down on the 1940s to tell the last years of a land by then at the gates of modernity – a modernity that reveals itself clearly in the language used by Columbu, characterised by a chorus of voices alternating between the murmured tones of the omerta, and the cries of the attittos and the ringing hymns to freedom of the two protagonists on horseback, before the announced tragedy. Because Balentes is a tragedy, and it couldn’t be otherwise in a land that makes it one of its tópoi (ma sa sorte, cumandat semper issa, est comente a andare a s’iscuru – but fate always rules, it is like going to the darkness). And like in one of Columbu’s previous films, Arcipelaghi [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (1999), at the centre of the story is the abigeato, a word that Sardinians have gotten to know and which means “livestock theft”, in this case of horses.

The visual references of this dark tale are many, from silent cinema to futuristic painting, from the Western to the horses of Eadweard Muybridge. It gives the impression that the director has chosen to narrate certain scenes: with few spots of colour, with simple strokes that give the train a geometric shape, with explosions of abstract material worthy of the best avant-garde cinema. Balentes is one of these films that gives space to allusions, that doesn’t present conclusions but alludes to them with a hermeticism typical of island people. In this story in which two children who have become adults too quickly are looking to free horses from their destinies as cannon fodder, there are echoes of national history and shreds of the present. In particular the anti-military sentiment of Michele e Ventura, still the engine of one of the most important fights that a part of the Sardinian people has been stubbornly carrying forward for years.

Yet Columbu also touches on existential themes, such as the desire for escape, presented in Sardinian cinema since forever, as in Cainà (1922), but also Padre Padrone (1975), and the injustice energetically administered by the Italian state (on that subject, see Banditi a Orgosolo (1968)).  What is missing from Columbu’s fresco, compared to his predecessors, is the majesty of the landscape. Or rather, it is in the background but only as a sketch, oblivious to the anxieties of identity, as though Columbu wanted to finally free this story from the cultural cage of regionalism to give it a universal breath, with characters who are not yet shepherds and not yet bandits, unaware of the fate that has been duly awaiting the Sardinian people for generations.

Balentes was produced by Luches Film, which also handles the sales.

(Translated from Italian)