Working Slowly (Radio Alice) 2004

In 1976, Bologna, Radio Alice stands as the voice of a movement built on fantasy, a refusal of wage labor, sexual freedom, and cultural provocation. The station, tucked away on Via del Pratello, remains under constant police scrutiny, and Lieutenant Valerio Mastandrea Lippolis believes it’s wasted effort to chase what he calls a circle of unrealistic, artistic, and drug-tinged students. Yet this world is foreign not only to law enforcement but also to many young people on the city’s outskirts, who feel the weight of a system that doesn’t seem to hear them.

Two young men, Tommaso Ramenghi as Sgualo and Marco Luisi as Pelo, dream of a way out of the gray, oppressive daily grind. They spend their evenings in a neighborhood bar, and when money runs tight they take on occasional “jobs” for a local fence, Marangon, a figure who embodies the rough edges of their world. Marangon, played by Valerio Binasco, proposes something that goes far beyond petty crime: tunnel into the heart of the city with the goal of cracking the Savings Bank in Piazza Minghetti.

Though the plan is dangerous and far from glamorous, the two men find the nerve to accept the risky undertaking. As they toil through the long, exhausting hours, they bring a radio with them into the tunnel, a beacon in the dark that keeps them moving. Against all odds, they strike upon Radio Alice underground, and the broadcaster’s creative current becomes the soundtrack to their hard labor, a rhythm that shadows every swing of the pickaxe.

One night, battered by a heavy downpour and exhausted from the arduous work, Pelo and Sgualo decide to seek relief at the station and are drawn into the wider world of student activism that Radio Alice represents. What follows is a sequence of events that intertwine their lives with a volatile period of local history, culminating in the dramatic and tragic crescendo sparked by Francesco Lorusso’s death, shot by a carabiniere on 11 March 1977. The ensuing clashes draw the two protagonists deeper into the turmoil: one is arrested, while the other escapes through Bologna’s rooftops, pursued by the police, trying to stay one step ahead in a city that suddenly feels both intimate and dangerous.

Throughout these events, the film paints a vivid portrait of a city at a turning point, where dreams, defiance, and danger collide. The radio’s rebellious spirit, the hunger for escape, and the personal costs of political upheaval are explored with a careful, human lens, inviting viewers to witness how a moment of underground activism can ripple outward into the lives of ordinary people caught between aspiration and consequence.