Exploring Goffredo Felicissimo and Franco Maresco at Venezia 82 Out of Competition. By Lara Laviola

Combine Goffredo Fofi, Danilo Dolci, and Franco Maresco in a single fresco, and you capture a piece of Italy’s leftist identity, a topic that is rarely discussed today. In the documentary Goffredo Felicissimo?, shown out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, Maresco honors one of the most influential voices in Italian literary and film criticism, who recently passed away, leaving behind widespread and unanimous sorrow.

This short film tribute centers on Fofi’s pivotal experience at 18, working alongside writer and activist Danilo Dolci. In Maresco’s signature style, the narrative avoids a linear timeline, instead revealing itself through impressions, scattered memories, and silences. Fofi, who was 83 during filming, recalls that year in Palermo as the most defining period of his life.

He frequently laments the weight of old age, and at one point remarks: “If I had to start all over again, if I had to live my life again, that is the experience I would repeat. Not writing books, not doing criticism. That is what I truly miss.” It seems he longed not for youth itself, but for a life shared with and for others. That communal experience—among the impoverished adults and children of Cortile Cascino, in the shacks, fasting alongside Dolci—planted the seed of his critical perspective and became the key to interpreting all his later work.

“I hate the rich,” the eighteen-year-old Fofi wrote in a notebook. In the years that followed, he refined his language and deepened his thoughts, but he never ceased to express it.