I've seen some great documentaries so far during the festival - some feature-length, some short. Videocracy, shot by Swedish-Italian director Erik Gandini, may well be the best I've seen. Like many people with a dual-nationality, Gandini is able to view his home country with a unique eye.

2010 Italy is a country obsessed with television. Its biggest stars are the presenters of trashy game shows and reality TV and 80% of young Italian girls have the ambition to be one of the velines, the TV showgirls who appear nightly on countless shows. Their job, acording to a man who trains them to dance, is not to speak. They are never allowed to speak. Only to pose on either side of the male host and dance during moments when the audience at home might be getting bored. Italian viewers are bombarded with images of idealised men and women; gossip magazines are huge there and even former Big Brother stars can become real celebrities. Does any of this sound familiar? With the exception of the velines, this could be Irish or English television that I’m talking about.

But what’s most alarming is how seriously Italians seem to take this trashy TV, almost to the point where it’s a religion. This is not really surprising in a country where the President is a media mogul, owning two of the largest television channels. Berlusconi is a man obsessed with image, having plastic surgery himself (allegedly) and ordering his staff to destroy any unflattering photos of him. He is beyond parady, with TV campaign broadcasts featuring sing-along songs with lyrics like, “We thank God for Silvio”.

Also featured is uber-agent Lele Mora, one of Berlusconi’s closest friends and an ardent admirer of Mussolini. Mora may well be the creepiest real person I’ve ever seen on screen, smiling terrifyingly from his all-white house while some of his young clients frolic in the pool outside. When he played his phone ring-tone, a hymn of Mussolini’s complete with a video packed with fascist images, the audience’s jaw collectively hit the floor.

The segment that sums this film up is the bit where photo agent Fabrizio Corona got hold of pictures of Berlusconi’s own teenage daughter on a night out with her friends. Berlusconi junior didn’t like the way she looked in the pictures so the family’s press agent paid Corona a large sum of money to keep them out of the papers. But several months later, Berlusconi printed the pictures himself - in one of his own newspapers. Guess his daughter changed her mind about them.

This film has been banned by Italy’s biggest television channels but it’s a film that can and must find an audience in Italy as well as elsewhere. It’s entertaining yet thoroughly depressing as a snapshot of a culture where you don’t exist unless you’re famous. This is a film that could only have been shot in Italy… isn’t it?

Eilis Mernagh

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