Fratelli Carbonai
Commissioned by the New Yorker, premiered at AFI Fest in 2023, released in 2024.
~ 17 mins
Text published August 21st 2024:
~ 800 words
It’s a rainy, dark December morning in the mountains of Calabria, southern Italy, and Nazareno Scrivo has arrived for work. He’s stressed. “Bad weather for making charcoal,” he says tersely, pointing through the trees to a ruined batch, going up in flames like a bonfire.
Nazareno has come up here before sunrise, while his sons catch a couple more hours of sleep back at home, to keep an eye on the vast charcoal mounds called scarazzi—if rain washes away the earth piled on top, the slow-burning wood beneath will be exposed to the air, swiftly turning the whole batch to ash. “Winter is horrible,” he says, grabbing his spade and disappearing into the darkness. “Brutto.”
That grim morning, Josh Hughes, my friend and co-director, and I arrived with our camera, making a film about Nazareno and his fellow charcoal makers, known in southern Italy as carbonai. We first became interested in their world because of the strange history of the commodity, and the ancient art of making it, which has roots that stretch beyond the early Metal Ages, six thousand years ago. During the time we filmed in Italy, however, the country and the carbonai were undergoing some very modern ruptures that would become part of the story, too.
We made a couple of weeks-long filming trips to Calabria in 2022, on either side of the September election that delivered Giorgia Meloni, and the most far-right Italian government in living memory, to power. Televisions in bars played her hypnotic, threatening speeches, and local newsagents sold Mussolini calendars. It was in this context that we got to know Fofana, a Malian working at the site with the local carbonai. After a tough adolescence, in which he fled Mali and arrived in Italy alone as a teen-ager, Fofana made friends with the then boss of the charcoal site through a chance encounter, and was offered a job. The boss, a man Fofana remembers fondly, and whose picture decorates various walls throughout the site, died during the early days of the pandemic, leaving Fofana’s future with the carbonai a little more uncertain. While his friendships with the other younger workers were developing, viciously dehumanizing attitudes toward people of his background were being normalized in national debates. As we filmed, we became interested in how this tough group of men, working an exhausting job in the mountains, seemed to have built a fragile sense of community that resisted the relentlessly xenophobic logic of the far right—but, we wondered, was it really a community of equals, and would it last?
Before the exploitation of coal and oil, charcoal was the only fuel that burned hot enough to forge metal; for most of its life as a commodity, it was linked with warfare and heavy industry, the rise and fall of empires. Nazareno Scrivo and his sons, the latest in a long line of charcoal burners in Serra San Bruno, do this job because of a decision two hundred and fifty years ago by the Bourbons, once rulers of Sicily and southern Italy, to build a vast metalworks in the Calabrian town of Mongiana. For a hundred years, Mongiana supplied European militaries with a steady flow of pikes and rifles, and the wooded mountains of central Calabria were filled with nomadic families of carbonai turning trees into charcoal to feed the furnaces of what was, for a time, the biggest metalworks in Europe.
The Scrivos are one of the last remaining carbonai families in the area, and Calabrian charcoal is, of course, no longer used to make weapons: every bag that leaves the site is destined for Italian barbecues, imparting a woody aroma to melanzane, pepperoni, and salsicce cooked alla griglia. Younger generations are eschewing the dirty and difficult work, even despite the chronic lack of other opportunities in Calabria, and the economic viability of the business is increasingly undermined by cheaper charcoal made in modern metal kilns.
Charcoal makers, working in a declining traditional industry, are precisely the kind of demographic that liberal commentators and right-wing demagogues alike believe to be particularly susceptible to nativist ideas; for a while, at least, the carbonai seemed to show that another politics was possible in the face of attempts to divide and rule. But the film is now something of a time capsule of that frenetic period around the election in 2022, when Italy decisively lurched to the right. Meloni is going from strength to strength, and, as of this year, Fofana’s no longer with the carbonai—after almost a decade working at the site, he decided to find better-paid, easier work in Rome, where he’s now living. He’s still saving up, so that one day he can visit the family he left behind in Bamako fourteen years ago.