A Mediterranean Heterotopia: Gabriele Salvatores and the Poetics of “Fleeing”

This article discusses the film Mediterraneo, directed by Gabriele Salvatores, in order to problematize and renegotiate its apparent political and historical inconsistencies and contradictions. The film presents a narration of certain events that characterized the role of the Italian nation-state and the fascist regime in the conflict against Greece during World War II. But Salvatores avoids a linear, official, or objective representation of those historical events, and proposes instead a fragmented, subjective, and potentially subversive (re)reading of that period. The deterritorialized spatiality of a Mediterranean island becomes therefore, in this film, an emblematic space of autonomy where a newly formed community temporarily removes itself from the simplistic notions established by the logic of armed conflict. Salvatores thus questions and subverts the implications of a hegemonic, belligerent discourse perpetrated by the nation-states at war against each other.