At the foot of a castle wall, a brutal siege has just ended. The dead lie scattered across the field.
A gravely wounded knight regains consciousness and, with difficulty, begins to retreat from the battlefield. But soon, he must face looters and scavengers combing through the corpses for valuables.
Cornered and outnumbered, the knight is unexpectedly aided by a humble archer—who turns out to be from the enemy’s army.
Dark Ages is a low-budget short film, written and directed by me, and developed as the final project for my graduation thesis Fiction and History: Images from the Middle Ages at NABA in Milan.
The thesis explores historical cinema from thematic, narrative, and aesthetic perspectives.
The Wheel of Fortune—this symbol so beloved by the medieval West—also turns for historical periods and even entire civilizations. The idealization of memory transforms our collective past. […] Often, idealization gives way to denigration and oblivion. Later, new documents, changing perspectives, and shifting cultural trends reshape our image of the past. The wheel turns again. Golden legends and dark legends follow one another.”
— Jacques Le Goff
I believe the Middle Ages are fascinating precisely because of this coexistence of “golden” and “dark” legends.
Through cinema—and through the voices of its many directors—both kinds of memory have been given form and visibility.
One of the unique powers of historical film lies in its ability to resurrect the past.
Each era, each director, can recreate that past in their own way—a past that always slips away, leaving only fleeting traces behind.
Let’s be honest: the image we have of distant times is shaped largely by our experience as viewers.
What drove me was the desire to portray an unromanticized vision of the Middle Ages—one where the stereotypical, heroic image of the warrior is stripped away to reveal fatigue, pain, and fear.
In the knight’s slow, agonized gestures—in his long wandering among corpses and devastation, searching for uncertain salvation—I wanted to convey a vision of war not made of grand duels or noble deeds, but of suffering and death.
And in the minimal act where two enemies recognize each other’s humanity, I wanted to show a glimmer of hope—not an impossible happy ending, but a brief flash of dignity in the face of war, which, then as now, is the ultimate negation of all that is human.