Forgotten Flano. A documentary about Canada in search of solitude

“Ocean Canada”, snow, trees, waterfalls, cowboys and Inuit. He was Fellini’s screenwriter, and in 71 he went on to shoot five episodes for Roy, an increasingly ill-fated end to his career, but one that says a lot about the man.

The landscape passing through the window of the Montreal-Quebec train was the same as it had seen on its last Canadian trip half a century ago: maple forests, log houses, cultivated fields as far as the eye could see. In this half empty space, not much has changed since then. It was the summer of 1971, a long stay from late July to late September. Back in Italy, Flaiano resumed work on several open projects. He had just come out of The Game and the Massacre and was putting the pieces together that would make The White Shadows. But in November 1972 he suffered a second heart attacktwo years later, who first forced him to rest for weeks, but who gave him, as he wrote to his friend Aldo Dazon, unexpected clarity: a “painful story”, precisely the heart attack, “which caused the first disorder. Now clarity in my life. Only this time. He did not recover. After about ten days in the hospital, he suffered a third attack and died on November 20. Thus, the documentary Canadian Ocean Filmed alongside Andrea Anderman, Roy had five episodes of about forty minutes each, probably the last. This part of the piece is different and undefined was able to complete.