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Force and Courage, Rise and Decline of An Italian Football Club - Directed by Francesco Bovara & Giovanni Merlini

Force and Courage, rise and decline of an Italian Football Club

Directed by Francesco Bovara. Giovanni Merlini



The 100-year history of the Sambenedettese Club. The football team from a small town on the Adriatic Sea that, in the 1970s, came close to reaching Serie A. The sports narrative

intertwines with the political one, telling, from the unique perspective of the Italian province, the bloodiest and most violent years in Italy's history.



Forza e Coraggio, rise and decline of an Italian Football Club is the collective tale of a community and its team, Sambenedettese Calcio. It narrates the extraordinary years of a

seemingly history-less city that, liberated from this hindrance, allowed itself to be carried away by the trends of the 20th century. It does so solely through a creative reuse of archival material, at times adopting forms closer to fiction than documentary, in order to recount the myth before the history. As of today, the city in which we grew up, San Benedetto del Tronto, along with the entire Italian province, no longer manages to look back in time. It drifts away from its memory towards a self-narration composed solely of the present, where the past, with its joys and wounds, fails to transform into a shared mythology in which the community can find its identity. Strength and Courage is, therefore, part of a broader project aimed at counteracting this trend, including the rediscovery of local archives, in the hope that the community of our province, by rediscovering its history, can rediscover itself.



Francesco Bovara, actor and director, graduated in acting from the Teatro Stabile in Genoa in 2019. He is a co-founder of Giungla Collective, a cultural association that has been involved since 2018 in producing short films and music videos, as well as organizing cinema-related events, including the Pirate Cinema Party. He has worked as an actor in films by Andrea Segre and Susanna Nicchiarelli. In 2021, he directed the music video "Nemi" for the musical duo "Appendice," of which he is the singer.



Giovanni Merlini is the co-founder of Giungla Collective, a cultural association that has been involved in producing short films and music videos since 2018, as well as organizing cinema- related events, including the Pirate Cinema Party. In 2022, he directed the short film "Talafì," and in 2023, he won the Ugo Adilardi Special Mention at the Zavattini Award for the "Forza e Coraggio" project. He is currently working on his first feature film.



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