It’s a rainy, dark December morning in the mountains of Calabria in southern Italy, and Nazareno Scrivo has come to work. He’s stressed. “Bad weather for making charcoal,” he says curtly, pointing through the trees to a spoiled load that’s ablaze like a campfire.

Nazareno came here before sunrise, while his sons were still sleeping at home for a few hours, to keep an eye on the huge coal hills that Scarazzi– when rain washes away the earth piled on top, the slow-burning wood underneath is exposed to the air, quickly turning the whole load to ash. “Winter is terrible,” he says, grabbing his shovel and disappearing into the darkness. “Gross.”

On this gloomy morning, Josh Hughes, my friend and co-director, and I arrived with our camera to make a film about Nazareno and his fellow charcoal burners, who lived in southern Italy as Carbonai. We were initially interested in their world because of the strange history of the raw material and the ancient art of its manufacture, whose roots go back to the early metal ages six thousand years ago. During the time we were filming in Italy, the country and the Carbonai experienced some very modern disruptions that would also become part of history.

We made a few week-long film trips to Calabria in 2022, just before and after the September elections that brought Giorgia Meloni and the most far-right Italian government in living memory to power. TVs in bars showed their hypnotic, menacing speeches, and local newsstands sold Mussolini calendars. In this context, we met Fofana, a Malian who works on the ground with the local CarbonaiAfter a difficult youth in which he fled Mali and arrived in Italy alone as a teenager, Fofana befriended the then boss of the coal site through a chance encounter and was offered a job. The boss, a man whom Fofana remembers fondly and whose picture adorns various walls throughout the site, died in the first days of the pandemic, leaving Fofana’s future with the Carbonai a little more uncertain. As his friendships with the other younger workers developed, national debates normalised vicious, dehumanising attitudes towards people of his background. As we filmed, we were interested in how this tough group of men doing grueling work in the mountains seemed to have built a fragile sense of community that resisted the relentless xenophobic logic of the far right – but we wondered, was it really a community of equals and would it last?

Before the exploitation of coal and oil, charcoal was the only fuel that burned hot enough to forge metal; for most of its life as a commodity it was associated with war and heavy industry, with the rise and fall of empires. Nazareno Scrivo and his sons, the last in a long line of charcoal burners in Serra San Bruno, do this work because 250 years ago the Bourbons, once rulers of Sicily and southern Italy, decided to build a huge metalworks in the Calabrian town of Mongiana. For a hundred years Mongiana supplied European armies with a steady flow of pikes and rifles, and the forested mountains of central Calabria were full of nomadic families of Carbonai They turned trees into charcoal and used it to fuel the blast furnaces of what was then the largest metalworks in Europe.

The Scrivos are one of the last remaining Carbonai families in the area, and Calabrian charcoal is of course no longer used to make weapons: every bag that leaves the site is destined for Italian barbecues and gives the EggplantPeppers and Sausages cooked on the grill plateYounger generations shy away from the dirty and hard work, although in Calabria there is chronically no other way out. And the economics of the business are increasingly undermined by cheaper charcoal from modern metal ovens.

Coal producers, working in a declining traditional industry, are precisely the kind of population that both liberal commentators and right-wing demagogues consider particularly receptive to nativist ideas; at least for a while Carbonai seemed to show that, in the face of attempts to divide and rule, another politics was possible. But the film is now something of a time capsule of that hectic period around the 2022 elections, when Italy moved decisively to the right. Meloni is getting stronger and stronger, and since this year Fofana is no longer with the Carbonai– after working on the construction site for almost a decade, he decided to find better paid and easier work in Rome, where he now lives. He is still saving so that one day he can visit his family, whom he left behind in Bamako fourteen years ago.

—Felix Bazalgette