In recent decades, many Italian filmmakers have been turning to the documentary medium in response to the lack of commitment by public and private broadcasters to the production of programmes of cultural significance (Bertozzi 2008: 305). Unfortunately, the contestable funding available for their production (mostly local, regional or special interest) is limited, as is documentary distribution beyond the festival circuit. The emergence and evolution of the web documentary has provided an opportunity for new channels of distribution and increasingly foregrounds the role of the user/viewer in their engagement, interaction and negotiation with the reality documented. The key distinction between linear documentary and web documentary is the latter's potential for interactivity, to the extent that some, such as photographer and multi-platform journalist Gerald Holubowicz (2011), have argued for a change of term to Interactive Documentary or idoc. The case of Italian filmmaker Sergio Basso's Giallo a Milano/Made in Chinatown offers a rare example where the director intentionally creates both a successful linear documentary film (2009) and a fully fledged web documentary (2010), where neither is subordinate to the other. These two ‘journey’ documentaries, borrowing Stella Bruzzi's term, are structured around encounters, and multiple subjective perspectives are represented as the narrative ‘travels’ in search of people and voices (2000: 99). While one form of travel is more fixed, with the driver/director collocating what might seem fragmentary or unrelated images or events, the web documentary allows for a passenger-/spectator-driven, random ‘hitchhiking’ (Gaudenzi 2009: 17) that determines the trajectory of engagement. The focus of this chapter is to explore the implications of this straddling across the two forms for authorship and point of view, audience and political advocacy.

GIALLO A MILANO: FROM POETIC DOCUMENTARY FILM TO EXPOSITORY WEB DOCUMENTARY

The documentary Giallo a Milano (dir. Basso, 2009) was sparked by the violent confrontation between the police and the oldest Chinese community in Europe, in Via Paolo Sarpi in Milan, Italy, in April 2007. While Sergio Basso's film is clearly a response to an event that highlights mounting tensions between Italians and Chinese; it can also be seen as a response to the stereotyping of the Chinese in the Italian media as illegal and exploited immigrant workers crammed into sweat shops undermining the ‘made-in-Italy’ brand.