Film does not change the world, even when directors and filmmakers convince themselves otherwise. Yet on occasion, cinema can stir the conscience, illuminate forgotten corners of history and society, and pave the way for political action. It would be wrong to say that Italy's closure of its psychiatric asylums—mandated by Law 180 in 1978—was a direct result of the documentary *Matti da slegare* three years earlier. But there is no doubt that this film helped Franco Basaglia, the architect of that landmark legislation, bring a long-silenced subject into the open.
"The people in this film are real": these words follow the opening credits of the documentary, directed by four hands—Marco Bellocchio, Silvano Agosti, Sandro Petraglia, and Stefano Rulli. People, not persons: because *Matti da slegare* is built on oral testimony from those tasked with the difficult work of piercing the ignorance of their time. They were chosen with care, each one selected to capture public attention at a moment when most still believed asylums housed men and women unfit for society. Much of the film consists of interviews with patients at the psychiatric hospital in Colorno. The directors chase what seems like unfiltered spontaneity, yet it is carefully guided by their interventions and questions, following the principles of cinéma vérité—apparently unscripted, but with a clear sense of what would be said, how it would unfold, and what it would make the viewer feel.
Young Paolo's exuberance. Angelo's fierce political passion. Clelia's stubborn resolve. Seen through modern eyes—eyes accustomed to the uncouth theatrics of public figures—they might appear only slightly maladjusted. They prove they can hold their own before a camera. Not all speak with clarity; some carry the marks of illness or long hospitalization on their bodies. But at last they can show themselves without shame.
The word "incurable" echoes throughout. Mental illness was once deemed a sentence without reprieve, until we discover that one "incurable" has managed to study, that another has found work. We hear, spoken almost in wonder and in language that now sounds dated, the realization that almost nothing is truly incurable—provided we do not abandon the patient to himself, and perhaps restore to him a voice that was always denied.
Financed by Mario Tommasini, who embodied the institutional side of Basaglia's innovative vision during his years in Parma and after, the documentary places work at the center of reform: eliminating the exploitation—virtually enslavement—of the unpaid labor of patients was a decisive act, paired with the slow, productive integration of these men and women into the local economy. For the directors, work is what restores human dignity, that which the asylum had stolen.
The film's power lies entirely in words—in first-person accounts from people who articulate, with clear awareness, their medical and human condition, and sometimes their fear of facing the outside world after years locked away. Some describe the inhuman conditions of the asylums, yet these are never shown on screen. By leaving the horror to the viewer's imagination, Basaglia's vision emerges not from the contrast with a system to be destroyed, but from the concrete example of what his reforms achieved.
Those unseen scenes—many institutions refused the cameras—would resurface in the directors' later fiction films. When Rulli and Petraglia wrote the screenplay for *La meglio gioventù* (2003), Marco Tullio Giordana's epic journey through postwar Italian history, they wove in a central thread: the youthful encounter of the two protagonists with a girl confined to a clinic in the 1960s.
In 2000, Silvano Agosti made *La seconda ombra*, a biographical film about Basaglia that draws heavily from the documentary experience of the 1970s. Played by the quiet Remo Girone, Basaglia enters the asylum he will direct in Gorizia in 1961, observing in secret the atrocities committed there. Once appointed, he declares with courteous firmness his intention to open the doors and tear down the walls that separate patients from the city—to dismantle what appears to him as a concentration camp. The patients and nearly all other characters are former inmates and workers from the asylums of Gorizia and Trieste, people who truly knew Basaglia and lived through his struggle. Their presence—in a film grounded in real words and real events—allows Agosti to reclaim the verismo that mattered so much in the 1970s, while layering it with a poetic vision that shows Basaglia as a dreamer capable of sharing his dreams with those who had known only nightmares.