Sacro GRA, a gorgeous Italian documentary about life along the highway that encircles Rome, has won the extremely prestigious Golden Lion award for Best Film at the Venice International Film Festival. If you ever wondered what life was like just outside your car, this is it. In raw, real form.
Filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi spent two years in a minivan driving along the GRA, or Grande Raccordo Anulare, a highway that serves as a ring road around Rome (say that five times fast), collecting the stories of the people who live alongside and with it.
Even if you don't speak Italian, it still looks like a beautiful and powerful film. That's largely because of the characters that drive it, according to the BBC:
Rosi spent two years... filming conversations with a cross-section of society that included a count, a paramedic and a botanist tending the thoroughfare's palm trees.
It may be too late to get this Jalop-worthy film into the Jalopnik Film Festival, but this is still one documentary everyone should go see. There's clearly a wide scope of society, from a man who I'm certain must've just had somebody whacked, to a mini Formula One track, to an old man with a great big beard.
I love that old man with the beard. I want to be him some day.