Torino 31 screening - review - IL TRENO VA A MOSCA (The Train to Moscow) by Federico Ferrone e Michele Manzolini

Il Treno Va a Mosca is one of those films that shows in a creative and engaging way the importance of archive footage in the preservation and promotion of national heritage and identity.

 Through amateur shot footage, Ferrone and Mazolini takes us to a small Italian town named Alfosine in 1957, a few years after the end of the war and among the working class that idolizes a politician named Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian communist party. It particularly focuses on a number of people from that town who were lucky enough to go on a trip promoted by the Communist party affiliated workers’ union to the Soviet Union for a festival in the land of Stalin and Lenin. 

The Italian documentarians employ a hypnotic style that draws you in and makes Il Treno Va a Mosca a sensorial and meditative experience not only through the use of some pricelessly amazing shots but also because of the very particular use of music. Its vacumn like sounds and long sustained drones broken up by sounds that seem archive at the time, including a popular Italian hit of the time adapted into a loving hymn to Lenin. 

Ultimately, the film becomes not only symbolic for the era but also the positive sentiments of the younger generation that it represents – the youth culture of the post-Fascism era. It is naturally followed by poignant feelings of nostalgia but also an underlying sadness of lost hope.