NOI ERAVAMO FILM

Between August 1914 and May 1915, the echo of the violent confrontation between Italian interventionists and neutralists reached even the nations that had been and continued to be destinations for emigrants in previous decades.

The distance amplified that thorny political and historical "querelle" that animated Italy, and when Victor Emmanuel decided for intervention there was an immediate and perhaps even unexpected response from thousands of men who had basically been forced to go abroad because the country could not offer them a living.

Former emigrants or children of emigrants arrived and nearly a thousand plus lost their lives. They were mostly humble and generous people. A great many were from the Veneto region, still intensely attached to their homeland. But people of culture, belonging to the middle class, like Fiorello La Guardia, future mayor of New York and later governor of the same state, also came to help Italy.

from this premise gives rise to the idea for _We Were _by Leonardo Tiberi, author of the earlier _Mud and Glory _and dozens of programs on contemporary history.

After the experience of Mud and Glory, my search for an innovative and effective narrative formula to bring facts and characters from contemporary history to the screen continues.

The extraordinary repertory material of the Istituto Luce lives and blends with the footage, which prevails in the new film in terms of duration and intensity.

In Luce laboratories and other highly specialized ones, the precious films of the Historical Archives were then scanned in High Definition, restored from scratches and stains, digitally scanned, and digitally captured by varying the speed of scrolling - to eliminate the wavelike fluctuations that the from cameras of the time had and that caused the accelerated and ridiculous to movements we are used to.

Finally, the black-and-white images were colorized, but with full respect for philology and history, using a process that in its results closely resembles the bichromes of the early 20th century, such as Charles Urban's Kinemacolor.

"In search of the lost colors," one might say, to see places, people and things with eyes contemporary with them, to give new life to the thousand nameless faces fixed a hundred years ago on the films preserved in the Istituto Luce Archives and to make them to return to all effects the protagonists of the film's narrative, shoulder to shoulder with the actors who evoke them.

Strong, bold choices, which might not be shared from by those who regret the patina of ancient to images we are all accustomed to, but in which I firmly believe, because they were adopted not out of technical exhibitionism or a desire to captivate the audience, but, on the contrary, because they are necessary and decisive, because they generate drama and allow the viewer to immerse himself in the story in a way that is as vivid and participatory as possible. Yesterday's war is like today's, seeing it to colors and at the right pace accentuates its tragic actuality and induces to reflections on the nature of man.

Leonardo Tiberi