Sardinia in fascist documentary films (1922–1945)

This article begins by looking at the context of production of newsreels and documentaries under fascism, and offers a discussion of the most important documentaries of the fascist period devoted to the città di fondazione (New Towns) in Sardinia: Carbonia, Mussolinia and Fertilia. Attention is given to the ways in which the fascist celebration of progress constructs Sardinia as a virginal land through a Promethean narrative that grants positional superiority to the projects of the regime. The argument made in the article is that these documentary films present Sardinia as a nude territory on which the demiurge-like project of fascist modernization inscribes its own history. The films should be interpreted as examples of colonial narratives of penetration into new-found-lands in order to revivify their population and wasted soils.