Blurring fiction with reality: the strange case of Amnésia, an Italian mockumentary

Amnésia is a sort of mockumentary that tells the story of a young man, Matteo Caccia, a former speaker at italian public radio, who suffered of a form of Amnésia that cancelled all the memories of his first 32 years of life. Amnésia is the story of a man who is living every day as it was the first. Every day Matteo tells the listeners about his new life, using the languages of radio and multimedia. The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles was the first radiodrama that blurred fiction with reality. Different theories tried to understand the audience reactions to that broadcast. Welles has been the first to show us how media representations of reality could be realistic but false at the same time. Many years have passed since that radio drama was aired; the audience has been accustomed to a more complex mediascape and refined his media expertise but the case of italian radio drama Amnésia show us how radio can still play a powerful role in structuring and conditioning audience beliefs. The paper will describe the format of Amnésia and the way it blurred fiction with reality, experimenting on the genre of drama. The study will also show the different audience reaction to the programme (believers vs. non believers) through the analysis of the listeners' emails.