The essay will be dedicated to a careful analysis of the 1968 film scene, with the birth of the so-called militant cinema. We will try to bring back, thanks to the numerous archival materials found in the historical archive of «l’Unità», the debate that raged then on how to pose and must shoot a political documentary. It is in this context that the director and television author Ugo Gregoretti will become a standard bearer of militant «reformist» cinema. The central theme of the essay will be to investigate the forms of intervention of the political-social commitment of the director, especially by examining his first documentary of political and social commitment: Apollon: una fabbrica occupata, shot alongside the workers in an occupied print shop on the outskirts of Rome. We will see above all why Apollon: una fabbrica occupata became in a few months the stone of scandal: loved by the workers, hated by almost all the film critics.