Below is the very short trailer for what looks to be an interesting film A Chjana, by director Jonas Carpignano, which won an award in the Controcampo section at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

The docudrama film deals with last year’s real life protests by African migrant workers against racism and poor working conditions in the agricultural A Chjana section of Italy. Carpignano, according to his background, is the son of “an Afro-American woman, originally from Barbados, and a family of Italian filmmakers. He grew up in New York but spent many summers in Italy. He realized that in Italy having a black skin is often associated with doing menial work – and that there is no equivalent of the Afro-American middle classes“

The director used all non-professionals for his cast. In fact the lead actor Koudous, had never even acted before. Carpignano and one of the producers of the film, Willy Friedman, met him while he was leading a march to commemorate the one year anniversary of the riots.

The project started to come to life when Carpignano and another of the film’s producers, Franco Basaglia, first met when they both worked on Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna in Italy, and later realized that there was a film in the protests – which proves that something worthwhile came from Spike’s film after all. (Sorry I just couldn’t resist that)

A Chjána trailer from Jonas Carpignano on Vimeo.