• PROGRAMME
• SYNOPSES

Little Fish

1. Director: Enrico Pitzianti
2. Editor: Sabrina Foti
3. Photography: Enrico Pitzianti
4. Production: EIA Film
5. Italy
6. 80 min.
7. 2004

Low Sulcis – South-western Sardinia.
The echo of military training is the background of the rising of the new day. The small wooden boat is ploughing the clear waters. Luciano is an experienced fisher but he is compelled to fish in a restricted area. He can no more cast the nets in his favourite places because of the military sea-earth-sea training which takes place in the Capo Teulada firing ground. In those waters he was allowed to fish in the breaks between the war games, according to a kind of non belligerency pact.
The history of the birth of this firing ground is very vague: sales, expropriations, insurgences of peasants who did not want to leave the fertile lands that the Americans, first, the English, then, and the Italians, eventually, found perfect to train war. This plan took place in the decade 1950–1960 when the scarcely populated Sardinia became a land to sacrifice to military demands. A vicissitude orchestrated in Rome, with the connivance of local politicians. A tragic epilogue that eventually assigned the military engineers corps 7500 hectares of land.
The car is running along the cement wall with barbed wire that bounds the firing ground. That sea, once so fishy, became a sacrifice without return. Luciano is a stubborn, resolute man. He does not want to give up his job and does not admit defeat.
He casts the nets, he pulls up the fish-pots and casts them again, he carefully prepares the different kinds of baits. But the sea is particularly mean, and where it is not, you cannot fish any more! Luciano and his fisher-colleagues are people who do not resign.
They need a sensational, civil but spectacular action. The public opinion needs to be roused. There must be an occupation. War games must come to an end. It is rumoured that the second American fleet, evicted from Vieques island after popular remonstrations, is taking place to those war games. And we are on course to the forbidden sea.