COPYRIGHT © 2022 FRANCESCO CATARINOLO - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED - DESIGN BY LUCA MATTEA - MADE IN TURIN WITH ❤
South Africa 1973, there’s apartheid, but rugby continues to be played, it’s the national sport. Many nations boycott a racist country. In ltaly C.O.N.I., ltaly’s national Olympic committee opposes the tour, but Rugby federation president Luzzi Conti finds a solution: play a match with Leopards, the South Africa’s black selection. However this condition, several national team players will boycott South Africa and stay in ltaly.
The ltalian team will only be allowed to wear the national team jersey during the match with the leopards. The South Africans don’t trust the ltalians; they consider them frail, undisciplined, and Catholic, but they have no other option. And so, an unlikely group of amateurs, driven by their passion for the ovai ball, forms the ltalian National Rugby team and sets off, far the love of the sport.
The incredible thing is that the ltalian players who went to South Africa, initially motivated only by the opportunity to meet the rugby world champions, made a contribution to the fight against racism. During the journey, ltalian players repeatedly risk arrest. Perhaps the most important action of the ltalian team is during the third time, after the match with Leopards, they forced the South African federation to allow that black players and white players dined at the same table.
The documentary project Trust these people, has a high social value because it tells the story of a team, the Italian national rugby team, which almost by chance is confronted with some of the taboos of a society, the South African society, dominated by racism towards all black inhabitants of the country. Perhaps the most important episode is the match with the Leopards, South Africa’s black national team, to be played in front of 25,000 black spectators, while on a turret a handful of whites armed with rifles control the crowd. Also attending that match was Steve Biko, the black anti-apartheid activist who would be arrested four years later and die as a result of beatings in prison. Authorities motivated Biko’s death by a hunger strike.
The documentary will also offer a snapshot of Italy in the 1970s, delicate years: between terrorism (many of the national team’s players came from the teams of the Universities of Genoa and Padua, where far-left subversive movements were emerging), historical compromise, and economic crisis.
Through interviews of Italian and South African players, and archival materials we will bring to light a historical context, that of Apartheid, which is unfortunately still very relevant today, due to the progressive spread of racism towards immigration and immigrants. The documentary will aim to raise the viewer’s awareness of the nefarious scenarios that hatred and racism can produce. An increasingly prevalent theme in a Europe in the grip of fear, increasingly dominated by far-right governments.
The Italian players who left for the South African tour risked arrest on more than one occasion in order to prove their humanity and oppose the racist South African regime.
So the documentary Non puoi fidarti di gente così, can surely become a positive example of success, of both individual and group action (that of the Italian national team) capable of unhinging some ruthless mechanisms and rules imposed by the South African government.
The narrative genre documentary, will be a choral account of a memorable journey, through the faces, the voices of all those players who took part in the tour. Trying to make these experiences exciting not only for those who lived them, but also for the viewers. Interweaving sporting feats, with historical events and personal stories.
The film will take an innovative approach as different visual styles will be used. We will alternate between interviews with archival materials and 2d cartoon animation. The photos will be animated with the parallax technique, this will increase the realistic effect of the photo that will seem to come to life.
Unfortunately, in the 1970s there was no TV in South Africa, but thanks to Massimo Calandri we came into possession of a 90-minute Super 8 video documenting the tour, shot by Italy’s coach Gigi Savoia, a great fan of home movies. We are also counting on retrieving other archival materials from a South African journalist with whom we are in contact, who is writing the history of the Leopards, the black national team of South Africa.
Having a South African point of view is crucial to the success of the project. We cannot limit ourselves to telling the story only from the Italian point of view. Travel to South Africa will be essential. Even from a visual point of view, South Africa is renowned for its extraordinary variety of scenic beauty, ranging from majestic mountains to spectacular coastlines, via arid deserts and lush forests. The same beauties that the players of the Italian national team discovered.
With 2D animation, on the other hand, we will tell some of the most important events and anecdotes of that trip that otherwise could not be shown, because there are no archives. For example: when Selvaggio and Visentin set out to play soccer with two black children and risked being arrested when the police arrived. A very powerful reference is the award-winning documentary Flee, which traces Amin’s escape from Afghanistan to Denmark during his teenage years. Within our documentary, the flashback element will become a real narrative language, represented with the genre of animation.
