Ora o mai più: impegno and the Teen Film

The G8 summit in Genoa in 2001, which ended with the death at police hands of protestor Carlo Giuliani and the brutal beating of many others in the Diaz school and the Bolzaneto barracks is regarded as an event that has produced a ‘collective trauma’ in the Italian nation. An experience which has been described by Amnesty International as ‘the most radical suspension of democratic rights in the West since World War Two’ has been an object of almost obsessive representation within Italian documentary production. Yet fiction film has barely touched this event, with a couple of exceptions. This chapter will examine one of those exceptions, Lucio Pellegrini’s Ora o mai più (2003). It will particularly investigate the extent to which the film’s generic status as a teen or youth-addressed movie is responsible for its habitual exclusion by critics from the category of impegnato cinema about the G8.