The general theme is contemporary war, the subject is inspired by the biography of some of the 53 Italian soldiers who died in Afghanistan during the ISAF mission (2001-2014), the voice is that of their mothers. The mothers bear witness with devotion to the lives of their children who are no longer with us, they redraw their character, behavior, ideals. They build an altar of personal memories that overflows with a natural love for life. They look for words and gestures to give meaning to their inconsolable mourning but also to the experience of death in war, in times of peace. In the context of these intimate stories, at times light and at times dramatic, an ethical and political discourse gains strength and space.
In Mio eroe (My Hero), the stigmatized voice of the grieving mother, always sequestered in the space of feelings, opens a passage, breaks out of stereotypes, and poses specific questions on the logic of war, on the origin of violence as a system for resolving conflicts, on the myth of the hero and on the sacredness of human life. The pain of mothers can overcome the militaristic rhetoric that prevents us from reasoning about war when we are in front of the coffin covered by the tricolor and sinks with the force of feelings into a more authentic search for truth. In these female testimonies the theme of peace and the theme of motherhood resonate for what they still are: publicly venerated and secretly mocked.
Only at the end of the monologue will it perhaps be visible, like a watermark in backlight, that the voice of the weeping mothers is the voice of human rationality.
