Les Hommes du port

Impassioned by Italian neorealism, I went to Genoa for the first time in 1947. Quite simply to see Italy, still devastated at the time by the effects of the war. I went back there five years later, feeling stifled in my home country Switzerland. I had decided to embark upon a career in the the merchant navy to see the world. Before taking the cargo boats to sail round Africa, I stayed in Genoa for a year and found a job in a shipping company there. I came into contact for the first time with workers and with men of the sea and ports. My return to Genoa was not until forty years later. (…) The port and the city had not changed much outwardly. But something completely different has happened there – the port is dying (…). In Genoa, the socio-economic and political context is explosive. Yet there is the feeling that things are moving and that the country is about to undergo some real transformations. Over these forty years, I had, of course, (with some regret) abandoned life at sea and had been making films. Today, I would like to use my experience of the one to serve the other and vice versa. Through film-making, I would like to delve into my memory of this large port, scrutinize the present and attempt to predict the future. Genoa, beautiful, sad, strange, today, Genoa seems to me to be a metaphor of a society undergoing profound transformation.(…)” (Alain Tanner)