Mussolinia di Sardegna: A weird, dusty look at a forgotten town

Is Mussolinia di Sardegna worth your time? Honestly, it depends on how much you like staring at grainy, sun-drenched footage of people building things that aren't there anymore. If you enjoy historical oddities and don't mind a lack of clear pacing, you'll probably find it interesting. If you need a movie to actually move or tell you a coherent story, you are going to hate it. It's essentially a slow, visual study of a place that feels like a ghost town before it even gets off the ground.

The vibe

The whole thing has this strange, heavy atmosphere. You can feel the heat radiating off the screen during the exterior shots. There’s a specific scene where the camera just lingers on a group of workers, and the silence is so thick you can almost hear the flies buzzing. It feels like the director was trying to capture something monumental, but mostly just captured a lot of dirt and sun.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Mussolinia di Sardegna (1933) through its definitive frames.

Oddly specific observations

• The way the shadows hit the new buildings feels almost artificial.
• I spent five minutes wondering why that one guy in the background was holding his shovel like that.
• The editing in the second act is surprisingly jagged; it feels like they lost a reel of film and just stitched the rest together.

Watching this made me think of the tone in The Lost Romance, though obviously for entirely different reasons. Both films have this weird sense of being trapped in their own moment, even if one is about hearts and the other is about concrete. It’s a strange comparison, I know, but my brain kept going back to it.

Why keep watching?

It’s the sheer audacity of the project that kept me hooked. You see these people trying to impose order on a landscape that clearly doesn't want it. There is a moment where the wind picks up, and for a split second, you see the exhaustion on the workers' faces. That’s the real movie right there, hidden in the background. Everything else is just propaganda window dressing, but that tired look is definitely human.

It’s not perfect. Sometimes it’s just plain boring. You’ll find yourself looking at the clock, wondering if there’s actually a point to the next long pan across a stone wall. But then something small happens, like a horse wandering through the frame, and you're back in it. It’s an uneven experience, for sure. 🏜️