“The Incredible Story of the Isle of Roses” and other Netflix films to (re) see at Christmas

Bologna, 1968. A tipsy choir rises from a bar in the center. Drunk guys sing. “Doctor, doctor”, up to the best known epilogue. Giorgio Rosa and Maurizio Orlandini, «inside the nights that are wet from wine», of Guccini and a city in turmoil, drink against each other, the ramshackle protagonists of a beer competition. They are young, and they have the promise of a solid future ahead of them. The engineering degree was able to guarantee him a job, a future. Not happiness, however.

And the boys, actors of one extraordinary true story, they have decided to guarantee it for themselves, a happiness that is at the same time freedom, satisfaction, the enthusiastic affirmation of life itself.

Giorgio Rosa, whose Sidney Sibilla in his prime film Netflix he gave a past different from the one he had in reality, he is the man who first chose to design his own world, where the rules were those of the individual. “President”, his peers called him, patrons of a microcosm that arose off the coast of Italian territorial waters, opposite Rimini, where the State no longer has any jurisdiction and Rosa, for provocation and ability (“For the same reason for dogs lick their testicles, because they can, ”he explained in the film), he built Isola delle Rose: a four hundred square meter platform which, at the end of the 1960s, dragged Italy into a quixotic battle.

The engineer, protagonist – with the face of Elio Germano – de The incredible story of the Isle of Roses, he was not limited to building only. But, at the UN, he asked that his bizarre island be recognized as an independent state, complete with citizens, its own laws, a language, Esperanto. What followed is a political war, which – as in the most traditional of fairy tales – saw a castaway oppose, a nineteen year old pregnant with a man she cannot put a face to, a German deserter to the Italian ruling class. Politics wanted to destroy the Isle of Roses. This would have wanted to thrive, its citizens to continue dancing under no one’s sun.

How it ended, it is good not to say. But in the daring story of Rosa, who went up to Strasbourg to consult the European Court, there is all the power of ideas, of a good ideology, which does not make us slaves but actors. And watch it, in the Christmas of Covid-19, the first movie among many Netflix stories that you can find in the gallery above, has its own saving power. Because, in the darkest year that recent history remembers, it reminds us how every will is accompanied by a way.

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