Film Commission Torino Piemonte

Based on a news item that became sensational in Italy in the 1930s, I want to investigate the material that this story has produced, combining it with the question at the centre of my work: the political treatment of madness. I don't want to find out if the stranger was Giulio Canella, the amnesiac, or Mario Bruneri, the impostor. Beyond the intrinsic fascination of the chronicle, this case contains within itself the premises of worrying drifts in the understanding of the notion of identity, and brings up to date what seems to have become an incontrovertible fact: an obsessive management of identity determined by codified data. By dissecting the implications of this story, I will obtain from archives the material for a film based on the words of the doctor, philosopher and partisan Georges Canguilhem: «Contrary to what they would have us believe, it is not starting from biology that we can get an idea of mankind, but, on the contrary, it is starting from a certain idea of mankind that we can use biology at its service».