“In Viaggio” is Italian-American director Gianfranco Rosi’s latest film, an 80-minute documentary on the pope’s travels that marks the dramas of our time.
Italian-American film director Gianfranco Rosi has made documentaries all over the world and he has won many awards. They include the Golden Lion at the 2013 Venice Film Festival and the Golden Bear in Berlin three years later. But how did he end up making In Viaggio, a just-released 80-minute documentary in Italian that follows Pope Francis on his journeys around the globe?
First of all, he had to immerse himself in some 800 hours of archive footage provided by the Vatican. It covers almost ten years of papal travel, beginning with the Argentine pope’s very first pilgrimage just a few months after his election in March 2013. That was to the island of Lampedusa, the central point of the migrant and refugee crisis in Europe. It’s the place where, just a few hours before Francis arrived, a boat from Africa had capsized and many of its passengers who were seeking a better life in Europe had again perished.
Documenting the journeys of a pope is not an obvious choice for Rosi, who was born 59 years ago in Asmara, Eritrea, where his father – “who was not Catholic, while my mother was”, he says today – worked as a banker. The younger Rosi received his primary education in Africa from the “wonderful teachers” who staffed the schools of the De La Salle Brothers. He then moved to the United States and has since traveled around the world several times.
Admiration for Francis
He has always been a “non-Catholic, but not an atheist”, he insists. “My spirit is always guided by an interior spirituality,” the filmmaker says. Then, almost effortlessly, he allows his deep admiration for Pope Francis to shine through. “I am always looking for a guide. And perhaps with this pope, I have found a spiritual guide, in the strongest sense of the word,” he says.
To tell the truth, Rosi didn’t really know Francis in 2016. That was when he made Fuocoammare, a documentary of more than an hour on the drama of Lampedusa. “Our fates crossed,” says the director, lighting the first of what will end up being several cigarettes that he smokes during our interview.
He’s wearing a black parka with a hat on his shaved head and dark glasses. He’s speaking to us via the Internet from Milan, between a trip to Amsterdam and another to Paris and agreed to turn on his computer’s videos…. for a few moments. “Excuse me, I’m turning off Zoom, I hate it,” says the man who obviously prefers to be behind the camera.
A film “without theology or ideology”
Lampedusa was the first place where the man of faith and the man of the cinema first “crossed paths”. The second came a few years later when Rosi was making another documentary, Notturno, on the borders of Syria, Lebanon, Kurdistan and Iraq… Francis was also in the region, making his historic trip to Iraq in March 2021.
Rosi, who sees his documentaries as depicting many “inner journeys”, says Francis’ journey in biblical lands is the sign that we must take a close interest in this extraordinary traveler who is the pope. Throughout his 38 foreign trips since the beginning of his pontificate, Francis “has never traveled to proselytize”, says Rosi, who insists he wanted to make a film “without theology or ideology”.
Yet In Viaggio is filled with the silences the pope observes when he prays or listens to those who speak to him. “He is a man who looks and listens,” Rosi observes. “When he’s in front of a crowd, it’s as if he’s looking at each person present. And when he greets you, you have the impression that he is only seeing you. He has a tremendous ability to be present.”
Rosi has actually traveled on the pope’s plane on two of the papal trips – to Malta in March 2022 and to Canada the following July. The director greeted Francis on the plane, like all the journalists on board. But as a filmmaker, rather than a journalist, he views the Jesuit pope’s travels around the globe as a sort of “Via Crucis” to the peripheries of the world.
“I made a film without borders about a pope without borders,” he says. “What strikes me is this is a pope who speaks to everyone, in a universal way, from East to West, from North to South, to rich and poor.”
“But in the end, what does all this travel really change?” we ask the filmmaker. “It changes the lives of the people who encounter him,” Rosi responds. “Of course, it doesn’t stop wars or solve crises. That’s why he emanates a kind of solitude. Basically, I wanted to pay tribute to a man who is trying to change something.”
Reproduced with permission from La Croix International.
