“You could summarize Spin Time as a documentary about the poor as you’ve never seen them before,” says Italian author, stand-up comedian and satirist Sabina Guzzanti, known internationally for her 2005 documentary Viva Zapatero! Her new film, Spin Time, subtitled How Tiring Democracy Is!, had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last September and will be screened in New York in early December. “The film portrays the world of the invisible poor, who refuse to play the victims here,” says Guzzanti, who is famous in Italy for her parodies and hilarious impressions of Italian politicians (her Berlusconi is a classic). “Instead, they make an admirable attempt – although it’s often doomed to failure – to live with dignity, as a political entity with their own culture.” 

Guzzanti’s film follows the plight of 450 immigrant squatters who in December 2012 began to occupy a large state-owned building in the heart of Rome, in the San Giovanni neighborhood close to the Coliseum: known as Spin Time, the building and its occupants have become a sort of idealistic collective aiming towards Utopia and have been aided by none other than the Pope, whose interventions have ensured that the city has kept providing gas and electricity there. It has become a cause celebre for pro-immigrant advocates, at the same time bringing the inevitable vitriolic and sometimes violent counter-reaction from the extreme right. We spoke to Guzzanti in Rome.

Sabina, how did your involvement with this project come about? You’ve been studying these people for years now, correct?

Actually, I wasn’t directly studying the story of this building. I had gone there a few times, but I didn’t know much about it. I went there when the city cut off the building’s electricity to show the occupants my solidarity. Shortly after the people got their electricity back, I met the Brazilian woman who runs an experimental theater in the basement of the building: it was then that I thought, “I could make a movie about this”.

Can you tell us about the making of this documentary?

I only met the residents after I had started preparing to work on the film. I spent four months talking to everyone, listening to their stories, even the bad ones, and in the end, this allowed me to understand how life really was in there. Then I took another month so I could write a draft and add some scenes to provide a re-enactment of some of the incidents I had observed; I decided which scenes were essential so that once we had decided what the main themes were going to be, we could create a reasonable working schedule. I built a relationship of trust with the residents over the span of several months – that was the year before Covid – and we got to know each other.

The film includes a variety of both plays and re-enactments of real-life scenes, in which resident kids act, and in which you even appear yourself: were these specifically written for the film?

They were made ad hoc for the documentary. I had already worked with some students for Spin Time