Me Ne Frego! Fascism and the Italian Language

Overlapping to a country divided into dialects, Italy, with a king who spoke French, fascism tried to build its own national language. Often this was an authoritarian and clumsy attempt rather than authoritative and credible. They discovered that the language of a nation is not built with the edicts.

“Me Ne Frego! Fascism and the Italian Language” is a documentary produced by the Istituto Luce Cinecittà, conceived by Valeria Della Valle and directed by Vanni Gandolfo.

The documentary, which was produced with materials from the historical Archivio Luce, narrates the obscure attempt by the Fascist regime to create a new and unique language, a new “Italian” that fit the dogma of the dictatorship. The video brings together the voices, propaganda and quotes from the Fascist era that summarise the folly and inevitable defeat of the regime through the words of Mussolini, the indoctrination of children and the repression of everything that did not respect the new Fascist dogma of “believe, obey, fight.”