Papers > By author > Daniels Jill

Journey to the South (2017) (57 minutes) is a portrait of a village in stasis, Castellar, a small mountain village on the Italian border near the French Riviera. The effect of two world wars and the explosion of tourism left the village without a local economy. Descendants of the original, close-knit families or ‘clans' continue to hunt wild boars. However, twenty-five years ago, a newcomer with radical views, a shepherd, was murdered over his refusal to allow hunters on his land; after three trials nobody was convicted. According to Bakhtin, collective memories in a village threatened with dispersal may create an “idyllic re-inscription” of the lost way of life. A lost way of life was not always ennobling or idyllic and a nostalgic re-inscription is often created in collective memory only because of the present threat of dispersal.