The film depicts life along the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the ring-road highway that surrounds Rome.[4] Rosi spent over two years in filming, while the film editing requested 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 to Kublai Khan, the towns he visited throughout the Chinese Empire .[4][5]
Reception
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]
