Jovanotti: “Chiaro di Luna”, the new video shot in Asmara in Eritrea

Translated by Google

The new video by Jovanotti, Chiaro di Luna, is released today.

The video of Chiaro di luna, is set in Asmara, in Eritrea, where many years ago another Lorenzo, Lorenzo Cherubini’s grandfather, had been a truck driver, at that time known as “Italian Eastern Africa”.

Asmara is a beautiful city, a place where Africa and Italy intertwine, beyond any possible prejudice and historical judgment. Crowded and slow, sweet and alienating, isolated from the rest of the world but so full of stories, full of references as a hypertext of emotions and thoughts. The signs of the presence of Italy are everywhere: “You do not have to look for them you find yourself inside and after a while you do not pay any more attention because it is simply the architectural landscape in which we grew up” – revealed Lorenzo.

Eritrea is a country in great transformation: first peace with Ethiopia in July this year and then, the day of the end of filming the video, the UN has approved the cancellation of sanctions against this country. The path of Eritrea towards full democracy has begun and should be encouraged in all possible ways. Lorenzo felt that this was the right place to tell Chiaro di Luna, which is a romantic video and tells about love in a difficult but changing place, where emotions are stronger.

“I knew little about Eritrea, I had only heard or read a story from East Africa in the times that was a colony. The news reports that many of the guys who arrive in Italy through the Mediterranean are Eritrei and I wanted to go there a long way; for me it is only traveling outside the circuits of tourism that one can know something for a real place. I had already programmed it, in a single backpack and away. Then I heard that this was the right place for this song and there was no alternative that convinced me the same way, “said Lorenzo as soon as he returned. “I wanted to tell Africa without stereotypes on that continent, because there is no place in the world more complex and more linked to our destiny, and stereotypes and generalizations are always just bad.

Kids do not run away if they find opportunities and more work spaces, they are proud of staying there or coming back.

Just like Yonas, a young Eritrean video expert who made the backstage and who recently decided to return from Asmara to Italy with his wife and daughter “.

In the video, a scenario that could recall a province or one of the Italian suburbs before the war: the market, the cinemas, the Catholic cathedral, the Coptic churches, the beautiful Italian bars. Split citizens of squares and streets of Asmara, worlds not “connected”, without advertising and not visible from Google Earth, out of any commercial, political, digital and also for this reason so fascinating, so absolutely unique and special.

The photograph of the clip brings to saturation a color palette naturally hinged on yellow, as the most classic of border films. The periphery, the environments captured by the camera could be those of seventy years ago, as well as those of a post-apocalyptic future. And instead the time of the video story is absolutely centered to the present day.

The style of recovery of the YouNuts, discovered by Lorenzo with the video on Saturday and today the most important Italian video makers, is simple but well cared for, with camera on the back, also because finding a drone at Asmara is unthinkable. A faithful portrait of an intact and poetic world, a surreal environment for the western world, but absolutely real today, at this precise moment a few hours by plane from here.

In the video there is a surprising lightness, an intensity, the atmosphere of a magical place, with the life that flows inside and the love that flourishes with any climate and in any condition.

Lorenzo in the video is a musician who for a reason not clear he is in this city and in the evening he plays the songs in the bar of Cinema Rome. There is a couple of lovers who hears it. The climate between them is suspended, maybe it’s their last night together, maybe they will not see each other again. But before letting themselves dance they tenderly embrace on Moonlight, the most romantic of the world’s songs.

“It’s one of the songs I care about most. When we listened to Rubin we immediately realized that it was the most important melody of the album and maybe that’s why we chose to make it, getting the maximum emotion, reducing the arrangement to the bare minimum ”

With the same criterion Lorenzo wanted the video, which without any special effect, tells the emotion of a simple story, in a marvelous land without any artifice, that excites as it is, without the camera having to use any “arrangement”, letting the images speak, natural, exciting, vulnerable and at the same time so overwhelming.

“It is an absurd, extremely strange, beautiful place that is ours