Alessandro G.A. D’Alessandro - Barbiana ’65. La lezione di Don Milani

Barbiana, December 1965. The director Angelo D’Alessandro had gone to Mugello to interview Don Milani for a documentary he was making about conscientious objection. The meeting with Lorenzo Milani and the children of the school of Barbiana would lead him to change his intentions. Angelo D’Alessandro put together a unique account in which the priest himself played a part, narrating, talking, explaining. Barbiana ’65 la lezione di don Milani stems from the recovery of the material assembled by D’Alessandro, the only person Don Milani ever allowed to film daily life in his school: the collective writing, the reading of newspapers, the older pupils teaching the younger ones. The present-day comments of Adele Corradi, Beniamino Deidda and Don Luigi Ciotti on education, the Constitution and the Gospels, the three fundamental pillars of Milani’s thinking, complement a story that reaches its peak in the sequence in which Don Lorenzo sits in front of the typewriter and reads his “Letter to the Judges,” written to defend himself against the charge of advocating criminal acts in the trial that awaited him in Rome.

After the death of my father I started to sort out his archives and I found the film he shot at Barbiana in 1965. Looking at the footage and listening to the recordings made me decide to salvage that experience. Little by little the examination of the material became a commitment that I could no longer set aside, because it was Don Milani in person, in his own words, speaking to the heart and conscience of us all, in his effort to turn his pupils into true citizens, into people able to use their own heads. It was important for me to preserve that testimony out of respect for the intentions with which it had been conceived by my father in accord with Don Lorenzo and the students of his school.