| Sacro GRA | |
|---|---|
 Film poster | |
| Directed by | Gianfranco Rosi |
| Written by | Gianfranco Rosi |
| Cinematography | Gianfranco Rosi |
| Edited by | Jacopo Quadri |
Release date |
|
Running time | 90 minutes |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
Sacro GRA (pronounced [ˈsaːkro dʒiˌɛrreˈa], Italian for "Holy GRA") is a 2013 Italian documentary film directed by Gianfranco Rosi. It won the Golden Lion at the 70th Venice International Film Festival.[1] It was the first documentary film to win the award at the Venice Festival.[2][3]
The film depicts life along the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the ring-road highway that circles Rome.[4] Rosi spent over two years in filming, while the film's editing required eight months of work.[5] According to the director, the film was inspired by Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities (1972), in which the explorer Marco Polo is imagined describing his travels to the Emperor of China Kublai Khan.[4][5]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 77% based on 22 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Sacro GRA makes the most of its unusual focus, proving that a documentary about the history of a road can also be powerfully human."[6] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 64 out of 100, based on 5 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[7]
Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com gave it 3.5/4 stars, noting that it seems "scattered and incomplete at times" but also that the "movie lingers in the imagination." He praised the "beauty" of the cinematography and commented that much interpretation is left to the viewer.[8]
In contrast, Jay Weissberg of Variety argued that "the idea remains more absorbing than the final product" and suggested that it was ideal fodder for documentary film festivals.[9]
