Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
After the India of Varanasi’s boatmen, the American desert of the dropouts, and the Mexico of the killers of drugtrade, Gianfranco Rosi has decided to tell the tale of a part of his own country, roaming and filming for over two years in a minivan on Rome’s giant ring road—the Grande Raccordo Anulare, or GRA—to discover the invisible worlds and possible futures harbored in this area of constant turmoil. Elusive characters and fleeting apparitions emerge from the background of the winding zone: a nobleman from the Piemonte region and his college student daughter sharing a one-room efficiency in a modern apartment building along the GRA.
Sacro GRA is a quietly remarkable observational documentary by Gianfranco Rosi, winner of the Venice Golden Lion. Its cinematography is exceptional — intimate, painterly, and patient, capturing marginal lives along Rome's ring road with rare visual poetry. Its novelty is genuinely high: Rosi's fly-on-the-wall immersion in a mosaic of eccentric, peripheral characters creates a singular urban portrait unlike conventional documentary filmmaking. However, the film's episodic, non-narrative structure means it has virtually no traditional plot arc — it drifts deliberately, which some find meditative and others find aimless. The ending, like the film itself, simply dissipates rather than resolves, leaving little sense of culmination. Acting as a category is somewhat moot in a documentary context, but subjects reveal themselves with natural authenticity. Overall a distinctive art-house documentary that rewards patience but sits below the threshold of broad accessibility.