Introduction

Born in Turin, Italy, Niccolò Bruna is an independent filmmaker and producer who has been experimenting with the expressive tools of documentary-film since attending the EICTV (Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television) filmmaking School in Cuba in 1999. He moved to Barcelona in 2014 adding his name to the Italian phenomenon known as the ‘fuga dei cervelli’ (a ‘brain drain’). Somewhat appropriately, his growing body of films highlights the effects of moving bodies and shifting identities undergoing, in one form or another, migration in-between different nation states. In this chapter we take the opportunity to view Bruna's documentary corpus holistically and investigate what it means to be an ethical documentary filmmaker in the epoch that the Mexican-Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel calls the age of ‘globalisation and exclusion’.

The independent forms that Bruna's work assumes are informed by his formative experiences as well as by the topical subject-matter of his impegno (social engagement), which is characterised by a personal humanist approach, as discussed hereafter. Certainly, Bruna's work is that of a global itinerant, foregrounding human interest stories against the prejudicial and exploitative backdrop of globalisation. Although this demands that he research and film in a diverse range of global locations (which now includes Italy, Brazil, India, China, Cuba and Ethiopia), we can still identify a loose yet consistent series of themes, tropes and motifs that stitch together his expanding body of heterogeneous (and heteroglossic) work. These can be broadly adumbrated here as being linked to: (1) the director's preference for a dispersed or distributed mode of storytelling that leads to a multi-perspectival and polycentric view of a given situation, milieu, or event; (2) an ethically ‘withdrawn’ or absented auteur persona, that foregoes any authoritative ‘voice-over’ conventions, while allowing framing, editing and the characters themselves to build and convey the multi-aspectual stories; and (3) a tropological favouring of female perspectives and characters with regard to the various events and stories.