Sacro GRA

The GRA – Grande Raccordo Anulare – is the giant circumference of road surrounding Rome, and is the setting for this cultural examination of the lives that dwell on the urban environment. Awarded the Golden Lion at the 2013 Venice Film Festival (the first documentary to be given the honour).

"Elusive characters and fleeting apparitions emerge from the background of the winding zone: a nobleman from the Piemonte region and his college student daughter sharing a one-room efficiency in a modern apartment building along the GRA; a botanist making audio recordings of the interiors of palm trees to detect and then poison the insects that are devouring them like a plague; a modern day cigar-smoking prince doing gymnastics on the roof of his castle, surrounded by the sea of new apartment buildings proliferating around him; a paramedic in an ambulance eternally on duty treating car accident victims along the vast road; and an eel fisherman living on a houseboat beneath an overpass along the Tiber River. Far from the iconic sites of Rome, the GRA is a repository of stories of those at the edges of the everexpanding universe of the capital city." (Venice International Film Festival)

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