On “Documenting Dissent”
Editor’s note: April 23, 2025, on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the celebrated Italian documentarian Agostino Ferrente presented his 2019 film Selfie, which first screened at the Berlin Film Festival, was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, and subsequently won prizes at film festivals in Luxembourg and Seoul as well as the Nastro d’Argento and David di Donatello awards for best documentary in Italy. Ferrente prefaced the screening with the following remarks (edited here for clarity and context).
“Documenting Dissent” is the theme of the 32nd Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival, which this year has chosen our film Selfie as its closing title. My film tells a rather quiet, double story—of grief after the police murder of an innocent sixteen-year-old boy in Naples, and of the friendship between two of the boys who mourn him.
I was somewhat surprised (and of course, flattered) to be invited with a film that is now a few years old, but which — as the festival’s curators confirmed — sadly remains relevant. This small and courageous festival in Amherst is organized at a university that has chosen not to remain silent at a time when many American universities risk severe funding cuts if they don’t align with government positions. Being part of such a limited selection (only nine titles), alongside films like the beautiful and painful Oscar-winning No Other Land, moves me deeply — though, I admit, it also fills me with a certain anxiety.
I’ve also been invited to hold a masterclass at Smith College tomorrow to discuss how (and, I would add, if) documentary cinema can still give voice to those who go unheard.
The truth is, I don’t feel confident at all — neither in the country I find myself in, nor within myself. And I won’t hide that lately I’ve been questioning even my trust — or perhaps, to use a more precise word given this particular moment, my faith — in the value, the relevance, the very possibility of dissent.
We’re living in a very strange time — one we might call dystopian, to use a word that’s been overused in the past. What once seemed to be a dystopia found only in books or films is now becoming reality.
I wonder, therefore, if it still makes sense today for a failed documentarian like myself to dissent. Today even the words of a pope go unheard by the very leaders they were addressed to — the same ones now claiming to mourn his passing.
I wonder what meaning personal dissent can have today—when even the Academy that awarded its Best Documentary Prize to No Other Land refused to express solidarity with one of its directors, Hamdan Ballal, while he was being beaten and tortured by Netanyahu’s soldiers.
Does democratic dissent still have real power? Or has it simply shifted from a stance that might cost the artist something and become instead yet another banal tool of self-promotional rhetoric — like concerts “against” war, against injustice, against world hunger… Such is the trap that, in my small way, this very outburst risks falling into.
And if I return to my own specific case — to my tiny little corner of the world — I’ve never made exposé documentaries, not in the classical sense. Probably because I wouldn’t even know how. I’ve always been more inclined toward what you might call storytelling that focuses on the beautiful things — small stories of grace, wonder, or fragile dignity. Maybe, in its own modest way, that’s my form of dissent: showing the beauty we risk losing if we keep looking the other way. To borrow another the slogan (which we abuse on social media and rarely put into practice), silence is complicity.
More than ever, everything today seems predictable and banal. As flat as the evil we continue to witness — and to which we’ve clearly become numb. In our small, battered Italy, even what happens right around us no longer shocks us . . . let alone what is happening in the world.
Maybe tomorrow in my masterclass I’ll try to talk about exactly that. About numbness. About how, once upon a time, there was at least an excuse: we didn’t know, or we found out late, or the information was filtered. Whereas now, we witness everything in real time, we see it live — and maybe that’s precisely why we end up feeling like the ostensibly neutral and disinvolved spectators of a horror film. Rather than realizing that we are part of that film—and of the horror.
After tomorrow, I will return to Italy and to working on my next film, tentatively titled B-side: it will tell another side of the story about youth in the poor neighborhoods of Naples.
Numbness is no excuse not to act, despite our doubts, and despite the impossibility of knowing if any of our actions ever really matter. We don’t know. But we have to try.
Watch the trailer for Selfie here.
AGOSTINO FERRENTE is a director, producer, and artistic director. His 1999 film, Intervista a mia madre (Interview with My Mother), co-directed with Giovanni Piperno and produced for RAI TV, was a hit both on the festival circuit and on national television. In 2001, he founded the Apollo 11 collective to restore a celebrated art-house cinema in Rome, making it again a vibrant center for cultural production. In 2006, his film The Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio won more prizes than any other Italian documentary. In 2012, again with Piperno, Ferrente directed Le cose belle (Beautiful Things), a documentary that returned to the young Neapolitan protagonists of Intervista a mia madre and continued their stories—again winning more awards than any other Italian documentary. In 2019, Ferrente directed Selfie: it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, was nominated for the Best European Documentary at the European Film Awards, and won the David di Donatello and the Nastro d’Argento awards for best Italian documentary, making his film once again the most celebrated Italian documentary of the year. He is currently working on a sequel to Selfie, tentatively titled “B Side.”
