For Lucio

For Lucio screens virtually nationwide from 6/1 to 6/6.

Following Lost and Beautiful (2015) and Martin Eden (2019), Pietro Marcello returns to documentary with his latest, a reverent portrait of the late Bolognese singer Lucio Dalla. Combining interviews with Dalla’s collaborators and friends with a kaleidoscopic array of archival footage, For Lucio chronicles his rise to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s, on the strength of his ballads that captured postwar Italy’s movement away from rural culture and toward hyper-industrialized urbanism, effectively discarding remnants of the past to make way for mass consumerism and the growth of the Italian middle-class. An intoxicating work of montage and cultural history, For Lucio is at once a moving tribute to its charismatic subject and a meditation on the concessions of modernity.