Since portable film cameras with synchronised audio recording became available, allowing us to go out into the streets and film, one of the most irresistible things to do has been to interview strangers about anything and everything. It might seem trivial today, since each of us has a video camera in our pockets, but at the start of the 1960s this act of recording the opinions of anonymous people was something of a revolution, creating a grand legacy in the field of documentary films through filmmakers like Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), Paul Almond and Michael Apted (the series Up, filmed every seven years since 1963), the brothers Albert and David Maysles, and, in Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini and his film Love Meetings (1964). In this latter documentary, Pasolini travelled the country interviewing ordinary people about sex, love and liberty. Almost 60 years later, Alice Rohrwacher, Pietro Marcello and Francesco Munzi, co-directors of Futura, revived this tradition of talking to people in the street, giving voice to those who normally go unheard in public spaces, focussing, in this case in particular, on Italian teenagers and their dreams for the future.

The film crew travelled across Italy from corner to corner, from urban settings to tiny villages, from vocational colleges to art schools, talking to would-be ballerinas and boxers, philosophy students and apprentice farmers. Rather than discovering a single identity, be it “Italian” or “teenager”, they came across a diversity of opinion, a cacophony of personal projects nonetheless pointing towards a cross-sectional idea: of dissatisfaction, disappointment regarding oncoming adulthood. Most of their worries are materialistic: how to find a job, how to buy a house and car, the likelihood of having to go abroad, pessimism in relation to the implications of work. Few imagine a cheerful future and the doubts multiply, with emotional and romantic attachments being relegated to the background thanks to the economic pressures of everyday life. Shooting on Futura began in January 2020 and so in a way it is also a record of the covid-19 pandemic. Besides affecting the filming schedule, the pandemic also became a further unhappy factor afflicting these young people, exacerbating their feelings of isolation, injustice and lack of opportunities.

In this chorus of voices there are several moments that stand out, but I will highlight just two for their symbolic value. The first is shot in a youth centre for adolescents, some of them immigrants who have crossed borders in search of a better life and whose Italian is not yet perfect, but who do not let that stop them from expressing their ideas. Responding to Rohrwacher’s question about what they would do if they were prime minister, one of them says he would simply try to provide everyone with a better life, that all of us have the right to the same experiences, even if that seems difficult to achieve. Another goes further and states he would abolish money, because that would allow people to all be equal; it is a fantasy of equality, both disarming and moving, because it comes from those who are most fragile, with the thinnest safety net. The second and perhaps even more surprising moment is a segment filmed in Geneva, at the school where, during the 2001 G8 Summit, hundreds of young activists were brutally beaten and dragged out by the police, one day after a police officer had shot and killed another activist. The complete lack of awareness or knowledge of what had happened among the teenagers being interviewed is yet more disarming, because it reveals a sense of conformism diametrically opposed to their counterparts 20 years earlier. Many of them were students of a similar age protesting for a better world, a fact the directors underline when they place the new interviews alongside archive footage of the 2001 events, showing the consequences of police repression. This is a fragile balance, the impossibility of generalisation that the film tries to depict — for every person who says their dream is simply to buy a car or be famous, there are others who imagine solidarity and mutual support or who dream of a different future, and it is in that uncertainty that we can find hope.