The new clogs

Donkeys, donkeys, animals. Few people still hold in high esteem the so-called pack animals, whose fate has been linked for centuries to activities primarily heavy transport for agriculture ? which have been transformed in recent decades by virtue of the increasingly extensive use of machines to replace animals. Slow and steady movements of water carriers and people, from vast desert plains to the steepest mountains. The donkey, like the camel, the dromedary or even its most immediate relative, the mule, expresses with its mild gaze an anachronistic slowness, the breath of a world that more than forgotten wants to forget. The film, made for the 'Il gusto della memoria' Festival with sequences of archive footage from nosarchives.com di Bracciano (RM), won the Documentary Section award at the 2013 edition.

The director's grandfather was lucky enough to live on the island of Asinara because his father was a prison guard. From his stories of the island and the white donkeys that populated it, an imaginative world has opened up on the reality of these animals. A route that starts from Sardinia, with its various donkeys and the symbolic representations of these traced in the furrows of the zoomorphic masks of the island's carnivals. The film is a journey that starts from the memory of a family from Roccafinadamo, in the province of Pescara, forced to emigrate to Milan in the early 60s and reaches little Claudia who, very quiet for their meekness and amused by riding them, would like to be a donkey when she grows up.

For many people in rural Italy, the donkey also represented a possibility of survival: Mrs. Giovina Balneanti (of the Roccafinadamo family) recounts, from her octogenarian mouth, that its survival in Abruzzo was very much linked to the ownership of a donkey since, in addition to its use as a means of transport, it was used to plough the land and to sell agricultural products in the surrounding villages.

The new clogs becomes a slow journey backwards, towards the roots of the Italian peasant world: the film was shot between Abruzzo, Sardinia, Tuscany and Emilia, donkeys and donkeys advance, without haste, showing us the good viaticum to decelerate.

"In the 'Documentaries' sector, the engaging and empathetic work by Daniele Marzeddu, Gli zoccoli nuovi, on the relationship between man and donkey, has been chosen, which debunks stereotypes and enters the animal world by telling fragments of Italy and traditions"

(cit. http://www.lagone.it/bracciano-finale-festival-gusto-memoria, 16/09/2013)