Images of School Inclusion: Education for Persons with Disabilities in 1970s Italy across Big and Small Screens

In the 1970s, a complex process of integration of students with disabilities took place within the Italian school system. A limited number of audiovisual productions for cinema and television have focused on this controversial phase, namely two documentary-style films (La bicicletta [The bicycle] by L. Comencini and I “diversi” [The “different”] by V. De Seta, released in 1970 and 1978 respectively) and two drama films (Rosso come il cielo [Red like the sky] by C. Bortone, 2007, and La classe degli asini [The class of dunces] by A. Porporati, 2016). These productions are analyzed here within the historical-educational paradigm of research into school memories, with a view to comparing how they recorded contemporary reality or re-evoked and revisited an earlier historical phase.