Fredo Valla, Occitanist.

Mariona Miret interviews a remarkable man:

Fredo Valla has dedicated his life to defending the Occitan language and spreading its history. This year, 2024, he received the Robèrt Lafont Award from the Generalitat de Catalunya, a prize given to people or organizations that have distinguished themselves in the defense, projection and promotion of the Occitan language in any point of its linguistic territory. […] I had the pleasure of interviewing him at his home in Verzòl (Italy), with the late afternoon rays of light bathing the kitchen, while he acknowledged the many contradictions he has faced, with all its personal and collective implications, in order to tell the stories that no one else tells. But be mindful: even though our interview has a strongly Occitan focus, Fredo’s life has taken many turns and has tasted many flavours. Behind the Occitan man hides an extremely multifaceted person. Fredo Valla has been a blacksmith, a geologist, an interior architecture designer, a cultural journalist for the most important Italian newspapers, and a writer of popular books for children. […]

Originally from Sant Pèire (Val Varacha, Italy) and now settled in Verzòl (Piedmont), Fredo Valla has developed throughout his cinema career a line of work marked by the commitment to culture and to personal roots, often in relation to the mountains that have seen him grow, the Occitan Valleys of Italy, or Valadas Occitanas (original Occitan term). Since the 90s, Valla has been a film screenwriter and documentary director, with a detailed approach which strives to be faithful to historical and cultural reality. […] In his latest major work, Bogre (2020), Valla and his team embark on a road trip through Bulgaria, Occitania, Italy and Bosnia to reconstruct the relationship between the Bogomils and the Cathars, the two great heresies that spread across Europe during the Middle Ages.

You can find Fredo Valla’s entire filmography and extensive biography on the website fredovalla.it. The film Bogre is available for streaming and subtitled in English and many other languages at chambradoc.vhx.tv/products.

Mariona Miret: Fredo, you have had a very long career. Could you tell us a little about your family background, and help us define what and where the Valadas Occitanas are?

Fredo Valla: I was born in 1948 in Sant Pèire, a village in Val Varacha, one of the twelve Occitan-speaking mountain valleys in Piedmont, in the north of Italy. I was born at home, at that time we were born in the villages. I come from an Occitan-speaking family. In my house, Occitan has always been spoken… until the 60s we called it nòsta moda (speaking ‘in our own way’), we didn’t call it Occitan.

I come from a family that had great respect for the value of language, culture, and in my family, I heard my father and my mother speak nothing but Occitan. When we were young, we lived in a context where three languages were present in our environment: Italian, Piedmontese and Occitan. […]

M. M.: The linguistic border that marks where Occitan begins to be spoken is a little higher in altitude than where we are now… did you always speak Occitan, even in your teenage years in Verzòl?

F. V.: Here, in Verzòl, we are in an environment where Occitan does not exist… we are thirty kilometres away from the natural linguistic border of Occitan. The border is at the limit between the mountains and the plain. Where the plain begins, Occitan is no longer present, historically.

There was a time, which corresponds more or less to adolescence, when I only spoke Occitan in my personal life, and then around the age of 19, when we discovered Occitania, it expanded to more areas of my life, socially, with other people. […] My father spoke Occitan to me.

In the past, the people of the Valleys had stronger contacts with the people on the other side of the mountains, with Provence for example, than with the rest of the Piedmont region. So much so that people would say: “Anem en Piemont!”. ‘Let’s go to Piedmont!’, which means they were going from the Piedmont mountains to the plain. […]

M. M.: How did you discover Occitania? Did you know anything about it back then? What role did all these stories play in this discovery?

F. V.: We didn’t know anything about it. We had no awareness that what we spoke at home was a language. Then, around the 1960s, people started talking about Occitania. There was Barba Toni Bodrier, the great poet from Fraisse (a village in Val Varacha, where I’m from), François Fontan, and Janò Arneodo. We were considered third-class Italians and second-class Piedmontese, and at that moment, through those leaders I just told you about, we realised that our language was connected to the great culture of the troubadours and the great poetry of the Middle Ages. Thus, we weren’t ignorant mountain folk or second- or third-class citizens, we were valuable.

François Fontan was one of the founders of the Occitan Autonomist Movement (MAO). He came from France, where he had sheltered French deserters who refused to fight in Algeria. As a homosexual, he was persecuted and imprisoned. Later, he met people from here who invited him to Fraisse, where there was a poet who wrote in Occitan, in Val Varacha.

Fontan was a politically committed man, and he started introducing us to all this. By then, he had already written his book Ethnism. His message was simple: every language corresponds to a nation. Every nation has the right to exist, regardless of its territory’s size, economic strength, military power, or the prestige of its language. And this applied to all nations in the world that sought to recognise themselves as nations. […]

The early years of Occitanism were exciting; I remember them well: meetings with forty or fifty people. It seemed like the goal was just around the corner. We founded newspapers—among others, we started Lou Soulestrelh, then the magazine Novel Temp, which still exists today (now called Lou Temp Nouvel). […]

M. M.: You’ve made many films and worked with directors like Giorgio Diritti. If you had to define your approach to filmmaking, how would you describe it? And which of your works from the last ten years stand out for you?

F. V.: I make a kind of cinema that has a social responsibility, with an important social component or relevance to contemporary issues. For example, Bogre: The Great European Heresy is a road trip exploring the medieval Cathar heresy, one of the great myths linked to Occitania. But Bogre is also a story about freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the right to be different—themes that are unfortunately always relevant.

As for our interview’s topic, I’d like to highlight the films in which Occitania is present: Il vento fa il suo giro, Lhi pelassiers d’Elva, and La barma. For example, it’s important to mention that Il vento fa il suo giro was the first film in the history of Italian cinema to feature spoken Occitan. It’s the first movie about the Valadas, with people from the Valadas, not external actors. Director Giorgio Diritti and I took time to observe the locals’ postures, mannerisms, ways of speaking […]

M. M.: In your home, several languages are spoken. Your wife comes from the Slovenian minority of Trieste. How has this shaped your family’s linguistic landscape? What’s it like to have this linguistic configuration?

F. V.: Yes, my wife is from Trieste and she has a unique background because her mother is Croatian, and her father is Slovenian from Trieste. My wife’s parents were born in Italy. It’s worth noting that during the Fascist era in Italy, the Slavic community—Slovenians and Croatians—was persecuted. For example, my wife Leda’s original surname is Zock, and during Fascism, it was Italianised to Zocchi.

In the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, there are many languages: Friulian in the mountains, and in Trieste we have Slovenian, Croatian, and the Triestine dialect of Italian, and they all cohabitate, the last one influenced by a kind of colonial Venetian because this area once belonged to Venice. When we got married, my wife already had two daughters from her previous marriage who went to the Slovenian school in Trieste and spoke Slovenian. The Slovenian and Friulian communities have schools in their languages, at least through primary school and sometimes up to secondary school. And it was in Trieste that our son, Peyre, was born.

From the beginning, my wife and I agreed that she would speak Slovenian to her daughters so they could understand each other and that I would speak Occitan to Peyre, and we would speak Italian together.

In theory, this should have worked, but in practice, it presented many difficulties, especially for Occitan, because the Occitan society in the ‘Valadas’ of Italy is small, and Occitan doesn’t have the prestige that Italian has, nor even that of Piedmontese. When we moved to Ostana there was a lot of struggle, because even people from Ostana who spoke Occitan would speak to my son in Italian.

This led my son to babble in Occitan—because to say he “spoke” might be an overstatement—until he started school, and after that, he didn’t speak it anymore. I usually speak with Peyre in Occitan, sometimes in Italian, and he understands me well. He always answers in Italian, but since he started school, I haven’t heard him say a single word in Occitan.

I remember a summer when Peyre was four or five years old. We arrived here in Trieste, where there’s this magnificent view of the gulf, with the boats… and he said: “Papà, papà, bèico lhi batèus, dins la mar, bèico lhi batèus!” (‘Dad, dad, look at the boats in the sea, look at the boats!’). But that stopped the moment he started school.

Lots more interesting material at the link; we’ve discussed the “speaking ‘in our own way’” form of nomenclature with regard to the Polish/Belarusian/Ukrainian borderlands more than once, but I can’t find out where at the moment (Google’s site search has become useless). Thanks, Bruce!