Once a year, members of the Ugly Club meet in Piobbico, Italy. You have a president and you vote for the ugliest man in Italy here in a mountain village between Florence and the Adriatic coast. But if you expect a freak show of the ugly and the damned in the 32-minute Arte documentary (Tuesday, April 18, 7:40 p.m., “Re: The Village of Ugliness – Piobbico rebels against the beauty cult”), you don’t have to turn on the TV. Because he will be disappointed.
The 2000 residents of the small, picturesque village have dedicated themselves to resisting the beauty craze for decades. Her battle cry: “Ugliness is a virtue, beauty is slavery.” As in every village, there are people who are supposedly pretty and people who are not so good-looking – some with big bellies, others slim. The members of the Club of the Ugly fight against these pigeonholes and realize that only a person’s soul can be ugly.
Perhaps with one exception: Daniele “Poldo” Isabettini was undeniably hit hard. The reigning ugliest man in Italy had a serious accident with his truck at the age of 28. He wakes up after 45 days in a coma. His face needs ten surgeries. A leg is missing. “I looked like a monster,” says “Poldo”. For 20 years he, now 57 years old, went in and out of the hospital. “I have square ears, a strange nose – and normal eyes,” says Isabettini, while the camera watches him look in the mirror. “If someone tells me you’re ugly, it goes in one ear and out the other.” Really?
That someone wants to challenge him for the title at the festival of the ugly, which is held once a year – Isabettini gets ambitious. He wears the sash in the national colors of Italy with pride and does not want to give it up without a fight.
The documentation lives from these little stories behind the people. Like the former club chairman who found himself so ugly and then replied to a letter from his now wife. She had contacted the association after the Ugly Association was the subject of a TV show. “If you weren’t engaged here after a certain age, you were an outsider. I was one of them and I felt ugly,” he says. The two got married six months later.
Or the letter from a sufferer to the association in 1988. Chairman Giannino Aluigi reads from it. “I have no success with women and would like to die. I hope you understand me at least!”.
Aluigi organizes the festival and constantly welcomes new members. “Self-worth is important,” he says. He has been the club chairman for eleven years. The whole thing originally came about as a marriage market, today the association sees itself as a parody. Anyone can become a member, says Aluigi, “if they pass on the values”.
