At the beginning of With the rain inside by Matteo Berruto there appears a writing that is a lifelong statement: “September 1984, international anarchist meeting organized by the Centro Studi Libertari – Giuseppe Pinelli Archive between Venice, Geneva and Montreal. Among four thousand people there is also a boy from Predappio: Giorgio Canali”. The docufilm dedicated to the “best Italian rocker” (copyright Giovanni Lindo Ferretti), which lasts an hour and 25 minutes and will be presented on May 10 at the Bellaria Film Festival (watch out for spoilers), opens with another assembly, in 2024, where there is still talk of clashes with the police, tolerance and music. The context has changed, but he hasn't changed.
Canali is 67 years old, 68 next July, and on stage he continues to headbutt the microphone and always carry the same thing with him: «What's left inside me is this perpetual anger I have towards everything. One morning I wake up in a sleeping bag on a bench”, he recalls about 1984, “there is a person who is bringing a group of students to visit the anarchist meeting and there he says we anarchists here, we anarchists there. I get up and tell him: what the fuck are you talking about, speak for yourself, I am me, you are you, we don't exist in my opinion. I left the meeting and took the tools away. This desire to confederate things will never exist. Free spirits must be independent.”
The cameras follow him in and out of the scene over the last three years. Like during a move, yet another one, which he can't stand but continues to do because “they're kicking me out”. Predappio, Correggio, Forlì, France, Ferrara, now Perugia (“like Ferrara, but much cooler”) flow by. In boxes he packs pedals, delays, tube amplifiers, even broken ones, which he will never throw away, and the vinyl records of his records (“Latest news by PGR is the best album we've ever made.” There is also the memory of dizziness, which he didn't have as a child when he straddled the third floor windowsill, and which he discovered when he returned to that house twenty years later (the inspiration of I fall?). And then family, a concept that doesn't interest him, with one exception: his sister Monica. He chose the rest: Noir Désir, CCCP, CSI up to Rossofuoco and his current partner. “You don't choose your family, and when you choose it, it's not your original family.”
Villa Pirondini, the farmhouse where CCCP – Fedeli alla linea recorded, also returns in the film Epic Ethnic Ethics Pathosnow ruined. Canali remembers Ringo De Palma, his exit from Litfiba, the opportunity they gave him to start again and his premature death, the cappelletti with cream eaten every day, Annarella and Fatur who “always broke balls”. Every celebratory temptation is nipped in the bud: «It's pure nostalgia, it's always been on my balls. You who come on pilgrimage to this shitty place, what's the point? How beautiful we were, however, portrayed along that wall in the album, me with my pajamas and the guitar in my hand.” And again: «The CCCP were a bit bad luck, but not for me». But a crack in that hard shell opens up: «While we were mixing Caspian depressionGianni (Morocco, ed) returned from Florence after voting, and told us that Ringo was dead. Ringo's last musical moments were in here, it hurts me a bit, that's why I try to put a cross on Villa Pirondini and everything else.”
The present, for him, is the only thing that really matters. Cut: Perugia, 2023. He records his voice at home screaming in front of a microphone, then goes on tour, alone or with Rossofuoco, preferring small venues, 200 or 500 people, without ever stopping. He sleeps little, travels more than he rests, and every time he starts from scratch, as if in an eternal apprenticeship, between sofas, vans and tools to unload and load. Vasco Brondi also appears in the documentary, who before music worked in a bar frequented by Canali, and tells of when he gave him a demo that he didn't listen to because “if the cocktails are so bad he doesn't even know how to make songs”, only to later change his mind at one of his live performances: “It's the best concert I've seen in the last ten years”. Brondi underlines his way of recording outside the studios which was ahead of its time, as well as a constant pissed off: «Only I like this shit». And one of the ways to vent it, like driving at high speed regardless of his fears: “Here is the cursed poet who is afraid of dying.”
Cigarette always lit, phlegmy cough, arguments in the street, arguments in the rehearsal room, curses that echo at every scene cut, the sound to be fixed until exhaustion. His musicians tell it: «He always has the monster inside him (as he sings in Monsters under the bed, ed), but a lot has changed with the arrival of Luana”, his partner. The passing of time presents him with the toll in the body's signals, even if he doesn't seem to listen to them all that much: “The balance wasn't there”, we hear in a telephone interview filmed by Berruto's camera, “because I wanted to celebrate, to overdo it with my friends and instead I wasn't physically well, because you can see that the guarantee expired just yesterday”.
In this (almost) direct take on his daily life, Giorgio Canali truly demonstrates that he lives from day to day, that he wanders around the world in search of new stimuli and that he throws arrows at anyone who comes within reach, as in his songs, capable of moving even the most insensitive: “We all have the truth in our pockets, but by putting our hands in our pockets we prefer to touch our balls”. The documentary film ends with images of another argument, with the organizers of a concert, who at 11.20pm ask him to get off the stage because they have to start a party at midnight. It ends in a hug, in yet another cigarette, with curses that can't be heard but perceived. And there, in those silent but restless images, the x-ray of a rocker appears. What Giorgio Canali is, a sort of blaspheming saint who curses towards the sky but only because, despite everything, he cannot stop loving life.
The projections of With the rain inside:
10 May 2026 Bellaria (RN), Bellaria Film Festival, Cinema Astra at 8.30 pm
14 May 2026 Bologna, Cinema Galliera, Sala Open at 9pm
18 May 2026 Florence, Cinema La Compagnia at 9pm
19 May 2026 Bologna, Cinema Galliera, Sala Open at 7pm
20 May 2026 Rome, Cinema Troisi at 8.30pm
