Whose Heritage?: Noi credevamo (We Believed) and the National, Regional and Transnational Dynamics of the Risorgimento Film

This essay will focus on Noi credevamo (We Believed, Mario Martone 2010), an ambitious and high-profile historical film about the events leading up to the Unification of Italy in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Highly acclaimed and enormously successful domestically, the film is undoubtedly one of the most accomplished and significant Italian films of recent years, although it failed to achieve a similar impact internationally. At first glance the film would appear to be a celebration of Italian culture and a commemoration of the founding of the nation, but in actual fact it constitutes a complex historiographic intervention that illuminates previously neglected or under-emphasised elements of Italian history and problematises conventional unification narratives by emphasising both the use of questionable acts of violence and the ultimate failure to achieve a true popular revolution. The tensions between the film’s foregrounding of national heritage and the complexities raised by its historiographic discourse, together with the differing receptions it achieved on the national and international stage, prompt questions about how regional and transnational dynamics impinge on national heritage narratives, which are relevant to a broader consideration of European heritage films in the new millennium.