IL CANTO DI ALINA

 Prostitution is nothing other than the product of social conditions.
— Emma Goldman 

The body is the first frontier. Even before the geographical borders, the Balkan route, Italy, Austria, there is the border of the body: the point beyond which someone else decides what can be done to a person. 

It is here that Ilaria Braccialini and Federica Oriente’s film finds its most authentic reason for existing. Not so much in the story of escape — which belongs to a now extensive narrative tradition — as in the possibility of reading that escape as the desperate attempt to become a subject again after having been reduced to an object. Johana is not simply looking for somewhere to go. She is looking for the possibility of deciding where to go. 

The film emerges from an extremely harsh social reality: human trafficking, forced prostitution, migration, violence inflicted on female bodies. The directors have stated that they also worked through encounters with organizations involved in combating sexual exploitation and supporting the reintegration of women who have escaped trafficking, seeking not a fairy tale but a plausible story, a kind of narrative that could be passed “from mouth to mouth” among survivors. 

The cinematography is probably one of its most successful elements. The camera, often close, mobile, raw, almost physically pressed against the characters, does not simply observe the bodies: it forces them to occupy the space of the image. A choice that the directors themselves have linked to an aesthetic made of spontaneous, dusty photographs, and to the desire to “think through the body” and through the physical dimension of the characters. 

And it is above all in the faces of Caterina Truci and Adriana Papana that this choice finds its necessity. They are two highly cinematic faces, different and yet complementary: two presences that do not need to be constantly interpreted by the film because they are already, in their physicality, part of the narrative. The other characters, by contrast, are less incisive, at times even more conventional. 

The film is, in fact, a first feature and retains the urgency and imperfection of a first work. There are elementary narrative passages, certain solutions that belong more to a television grammar than to a genuinely cinematic elaboration, and moments in which the writing tends to make explicit what the image could have allowed to emerge on its own. The social intention is at times stronger than the form that should contain it. 

But it would be a mistake to confuse this imperfection with the absence of a voice. 

Because Il canto di Alina possesses, at its best, something that purely technical perfection cannot guarantee: a necessity. 

The centre of the film is not, ultimately, Johana’s escape either. It is the relationship between two women who, within a condition of radical dehumanization, manage to construct a human space. 

Their bond is all the more significant because it is born in a place where every relationship should be impossible. Forced prostitution separates, uses, hierarchizes, making each body isolated and available. Alina and Johana do exactly the opposite: they recognize one another. 

This is why one of the most beautiful scenes is the one in which, after spending a day doing that terrible work, the two girls bathe together in the same bathtub. 

It is an apparently simple image, but it contains almost the entire film. 

Water should wash the day from the body, erase its traces, restore a sense of neutrality. But here, the bath is not simply about cleanliness. It is the moment in which the body becomes a body again precisely because it is removed from the gaze and use of others. And above all because it is shared. 

They are no longer two available bodies. They are two bodies keeping each other company. 

The reciprocal gesture produces a form of intimacy that is not sexual, but almost ontological: for a few minutes, each gives the other back the possibility of existing outside the function to which she has been reduced. It is a small community within a condition of slavery. 

And this makes a line spoken by the taxi driver even more interesting: he talks about the smells of people and says, essentially, that there are smells one never forgets. 

It is an apparently marginal line, but perhaps one of the most profound in the film. 

Lorenzo cannot fully know how deeply Johana can understand those words: because for her, the smell of another person is not simply memory. It is the memory of a violated body. 

How many smells must she have carried on her body and within herself: those of the men she did not choose, those of imposed encounters, those of violence, fear and coercion. Smells that the body records even when consciousness would like to erase them. Olfactory memory thus becomes an involuntary memory of slavery. 

Lorenzo speaks of smell as something that belongs to human experience. Johana could hear it instead as something that belongs to the history of her own body. 

And it is precisely here that the two characters, without knowing it, meet: they both discover that the body preserves what the will cannot erase. 

The journey towards Austria is therefore also a journey through different forms of solitude. Lorenzo and Johana belong to apparently irreconcilable worlds. She is a young migrant who is a victim of trafficking; he is a relatively protected European man who suddenly finds himself kidnapped and threatened. And yet, in their relationship, the film avoids an overly stark moral simplification: the victim can exercise violence, the kidnapped man can become an interlocutor, and two people can recognise one another without their conditions becoming equivalent. 

Johana does not suddenly become innocent because she is a victim. Lorenzo does not suddenly become the victim because he has been kidnapped. Rather, the film stages something more complex: the possibility that, within a violent situation, two subjects can gradually begin to see one another as human beings again. 

Johana has spent part of her life living within decisions made by others: where to go, where to stay, whom to be with, what to do with her own body. Even the journey to Europe, which should have meant freedom, becomes the continuation of slavery in other forms. 

This is why the final border has a meaning that goes beyond geography. The border is the point at which, finally, someone gives her back the most elementary question of existence: what do you want to do, as the repossession of a possibility. 

There is only the repossession of a possibility. 

The title itself, Il canto di Alina, thus acquires an additional meaning. Alina dies, but her relationship with Johana continues. Her “song” is not a voice that miraculously returns from beyond the grave: it is what remains in another person after an encounter. Survival does not consist in forgetting the person who has died, but in carrying forward a possibility that person represented. 

And this also makes it possible to read the film socially without reducing it to a “social issue” film. 

What is striking is the distance between the idea a society has of itself and what it continues to produce. We constantly speak of civilization, rights, progress, emancipation, Europe. And at the same time there are female bodies that are bought, exploited, threatened, subjected to violence every day, as though modernity had never reached them. 

Trafficking is not a pre-modern remnant hidden on the margins of civilization. It is one of its internal contradictions. 

And perhaps this is the most disturbing point in the film: it does not show us a world completely different from our own. It shows us something that can exist within our very own world. 

Il canto di Alina is therefore an imperfect film, at times naïve, occasionally too explicit and formally uneven. But precisely within this imperfection it manages to find certain images of genuine strength. 

Above all, it manages to understand one essential thing: when almost everything has been taken away from a person, even the possibility of choosing becomes a radical experience of freedom. 

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. 

Toni Morrison