The preview images of the documentary “Stonebreakers” by the Italian director Valerio Ciriaci at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence
They scream, embrace, sing: “Throw it away down, throw it down ». An African American girl shouts: “It’s been a long time but now things are going to change.” Another picks up the megaphone and says, “Ours ancestors they brought us here, to this moment in history, and they are at our side ». And then again, all together: “Throw it down, throw it down.” June 24, 2020, New Haven, Connecticut: Protesters cheer the removal of the statue of Christopher Columbus at Wooster Square Park. It is a historic moment: the statue comes removed 128 years after its installation. It was 1892 when it was inaugurated. Now it comes demolished. A decision made by the City Council and Mayor Justin Elicker after numerous petitions of citizenship that required their removal. There is a municipal worker who harnesses Columbus’s body with ropes, then a truck that lifts it from the base on which he rested. The statue comes off, the crowd is exalted. “Throw it down, throw it down.” After the removal, the mayor set up a commission to evaluate new proposals for statues and monuments. On July 29, 2021, they voted to choose the idea winnera sculptural group depicting a immigrant family Italian on their arrival in the United States.
Columbus was for everyone a symboland hero. Today for many Americans it is instead a monsterone slaver, a. And then down the. And the one in New Haven. Filming the killing and the ideology behind the movements is the Italian director’s camera Valerius Ciriaci, who lives in New York and who for years has followed the American movements that want to rewrite history and sweep away the statues. You made the documentary of it “Stonebreakers», Which will be presented in world premiere as part of the 63rd edition of the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, Saturday 12 November 2022 at 5 pm at the Cinema Spazio Alfieri. (Complete program www.festivaldeipopoli.org).
«When the wave of protests of the Black Lives Matter poured out onto the streets of major American cities – said the director Ciriaci – in New York I had recently paused the production of a documentary on mito Columbus and on the controversies related to the celebration of Columbus Day. With the arrival of the pandemic, the theme seemed to have faded into the background, but I had to change my mind immediately, when the first statue of Columbus was knocked down in the midst of protests over the killing of George Floyd. At that moment I decided to broaden the gaze of the film, not to stop in Colombo and to tackle the knot of memory American in its entirety “.
Not only Columbus, in fact. Others have also paid for it general Southerners and politicians associated with the colonial past (here the multimedia special of Corriere della Sera). Among them the general Robert E Lee, of the Confederate Army, whose statue was removed in Richmond. And then generals, admirals, sometimes soldiers unknown as Stonewall Jackson, Lee’s deputy; or Matthew Fontaine Maury, commander of the Confederation Navy or JEB Stuard, commander of the Southern cavalry. In Portland, Oregon, the statue of George Washington was shot down and then burned because Washington was a slave owner. An iconoclastic fury by Black Lives Matter. Statues vandalized, scarred, beheaded, shot down. Sometimes illegally and without any permission, sometimes after collective reflection and by decision of the municipal administrations. In New York, the monument to the former president was also removed Theodore Roosevelt which since 1940 stood in front of the New York Museum of Natural History. The equestrian statue, which depicted Roosevelt on horseback with a Native American and an African at his feet, had become object of criticism because it is a symbol of colonialism and racism. Yet, in 1906 Roosevelt, one of the pioneers of environmentalism, won the Nobel Peace Prize in the aftermath of his mediation in guerra between Russia and Japan. An iconoclastic fury that does not forgive and that also overwhelms various European countries. In London, for example, the statue of Winston Churchill, a hero of the Second World War but also involved in the atrocity against blacks and whites in Africa.
Now is the time to rewrite history, say activists who want to tear down the statues. They also want to abolish the Columbus Day, which is celebrated every 12 October to celebrate the landing of the Genoese explorer in the New World. There are already 13 American states that have canceled the recurrencereplacing it with a day in memory of suffering suffered by the natives. Cabrini Day has arrived in Colorado, a tribute to Mother Cabrini, the nun who founded schools, orphanages and hospitals and became the first American saint in 1946.
History, argue those who want revisit it, was written by the winners. America, they say, was not discovered by Columbus, it is a mystifying vision, America already existed before. There were the natives. Yeah, the natives, what happened to them when Columbus arrived? Since the 1980s, studies and essays have proliferated on that past not so well known, pointing out the consequences to the indigenous population of the arrival of Europeans. Especially to the detriment of the Taino, the population that suffered the worst consequences. It was the Taìno ad kill some men left in the Caribbean islands by Colombo, killed in the aftermath of the raids carried out by the conquerors in search of gold, slaves and women. There retaliation Europe led to the imprisonment of about 500 indigenous people, of whom about 200 died on the return journey, a sort of vendetta which over the years, according to some historians, became genocide, with violence and atrocities committed against the natives. According to some studies, Europeans ordered all Tainos aged 14 and over to deliver a certain amount of gold dust every three months. If not, their hands would have been cut off. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish bishop engaged in the defense of Native Americans, arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti), at the age of 18. He wrote i abuses which he witnessed in the text “Brief account of the destruction of the Indies“: “Their [gli esploratori spagnoli] they made their way into the settlements natives, massacring everyone they found there, including small children, old people, pregnant women and even women who had just given birth. They made them to piecesslashing their bellies with swords as if they were many sheep huddled in an enclosure ».
Also for this the fury iconoclastic rages. Yet, at the end of the nineteenth century, Columbus was a myth celebrated even by those who at that time were victims of discrimination, such as Italian immigrants in America. Thus was born Columbus Day, which became an occasion to celebrate Italian pride. And therefore, on the other hand, the are also strong reasons of those who do not want to tear down those statues. Columbus, for example, was not only a man who committed abuses on the natives, but above all a explorer which, through his discoveries, opened new ones horizons to humanity. An open debate that yes will develop even in the years to come.
October 31, 2022 – Updated November 1, 2022, 13:14
© Time.News