A The bride, the new tv series by Serena Rossi, a small media masterpiece has succeeded: conquering sensational audiences (also in streaming) and at the same time catalyze a number of controversies on both the political and geographical fronts as they have not seen for a long time. Small dutiful promise: the Rai1 fiction, which last Sunday debuted with almost 6 million spectators and over 26% share, is set in Italy in the late 1960s, amidst major changes in customs and politics, struggles of farm laborers in the countryside and the role of women squeezed between emancipation, gender equality and a practice that was still very widespread at the time. of proxy marriages. “Young women from the South were given in brides to men from the North, mostly farmers”, reads the press kit of the series produced by Endemol Shine Italy per Rai Fiction. The protagonist is Maria (Serena Rossi, in fact), “a young Calabrian woman who, to save her family from poverty, decides to accept the marriage by proxy wanted by the rude Vicentine farmer Vittorio Bassi (Maurizio Donadoni). Maria’s family is heavily indebted to Zi ‘Michele and his wife Carmela, who have arranged the marriage, and accepting it is the only solution to pay the debt ”. Is exactly the spark of controversy has been triggered on the unprecedented Veneto-Calabria axis that poison the climate a few hours after the airing of the second episode, that of Sunday 23 January.
THE VERY HARD STRONCATURA DI SPIRLÌ
“#Farm. They speak a strange language, which does not correspond to any of the languages of Calabria! ”. It went down as heavy as a club Nino Spirlì, the acting President of the Calabria Region, who did not like the Rai1 fiction and made it clear with a vitriolic post on Facebook in which you can read phrases such as “they continue to churn out fiction treating us like orangutans!” and hashtag like #acalciinculofuoridallaCalabria. But in addition to provocations and effective slogans, Spirlì tried to argue his opposition: “Proxy marriages were done at the limit, for distant lands – Americas, Australia, Belgium… – and not for the northern regions. Perhaps, some of our women left for Piedmont, or the Aosta Valley and Liguria, where groups of Calabresi had already settled, mcertainly not for Veneto, which was a more depressed region than Calabria“. Words that have raised further controversy in the controversies, to which the Lega politician responded with a second clarification, reviving his past as a screenwriter. “I wrote subjects for fiction for RaiUno: I have always followed the golden rule, that is, when I was inspired by real life, I respectfully adhered to it. Cinematography is a contemporary literary form: with it we deliver ourselves to the future and we cannot go wrong. We could create a false past for our heirs. This is why, adhering to the recent past of Calabria, the authors should have at least documented themselves better and transferred a true truth “.
EVEN VENETO AGAINST FICTION TI RAI1
Too many prejudices and clichés for granted. Even in Veneto they did not take well the fiction directed by the director Giacomo Campiotti (moreover, an award-winning professional and respected by many, who has signed, among other series, also the sbanca listen Braccialetti rossi), with the president of the Veneto regional council Roberto Ciambetti, also a Northern League supporter, who even speaks of a “false historian”. «If we want to talk about weddings by proxy and their harsh and sad reality, I think it would be enough to review ‘Bello, honest, emigrated from Australia would marry fellow countryman’ of Luigi Zampa with an absolutely amazing Alberto Sordi. That film is enough to demonstrate the inadequacy of Rai Fiction’s La sposa series: thinking about a marriage by proxy at the end of the Sixties of a young Calabrian woman with a rich but rough descendant of a Vicenza farmer is, to say the least, a risk if not a senseless provocation and very far from historical reality “, wrote the politician Veneto. “Fiction in English means fiction as well as narrative, but here the fiction and the narrative end up in a false historian. Already the idea of staging a rude and violent Vicentine for a marriage by proxy does not hold up: farmers I don’t say rich, nor well-off, but also only not poor, not in Veneto but everywhere in Italy, including Calabria, they certainly didn’t have need to resort to proxy marriages to get married “.
THE PRODUCTION COMPANY’S RESPONSE
But the controversy seems to have done the series well, as the additional streaming data shows: on RaiPlay 400,000 streams and an average audience of over 150,000 spectators, which add up to the almost six million of the first episode. Meanwhile, from Endemol comes the reply: “The series is inspired by historically documented facts. This is also confirmed by the many testimonies that have arrived in recent days, including on social networks, of people who recognize themselves, or recognize the stories of their families, in those situations and in those years. The Bride is a fictional tale that aims to highlight a story of emancipation and redemption, with characters that are anything but stereotyped but very complex and subject to a profound evolution over the course of the episodes “. For better or for worse, the important thing is that we talk about it.
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