Roberto Rossellini once said that a good movie has the power to change the world, and here's a film made by his compatriots (octogenarian Italian brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani) that may prove him right. It certainly alters the way one looks at the world, at history and how art can lock people in a vice-grip of obsessive fascination, or free them from the incarcerating chains of the mundane.
"Cesare Deve Morire" is the Taviani brothers' latest work in a joint career that spans more than six decades, and won them the Golden Bear at last year's Berlin International Film Festival. A documentary about inmates at Rome's maximum-security prison Rebibbia, it follows their lives from the day that they're told they will stage a production of William Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," moves through the weeks of rehearsals, then reaches an impressive climax at a public performance.
To describe "Cesare Deve Morire" as moving would be to cheapen its no-exit, unforgiving reality. Most of the inmates have served more than 10 years already, many of them sentenced to twice that time or more. Some of them have committed multiple crimes. Others were members of the Mafia.
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