Film Commission Torino Piemonte

Patrizia’s life takes place in the dark. Before sunrise, while her teenage daughters are still asleep, she puts on her heavy boots, respirator, and her “mask”. Then she enters the “cage”, an ancient elevator, and descends into a black hole 500 metres below sea level. She was 20 when her father, a miner who died last year of silicosis, accompanied her here for the first time. One can still die easily in the mines today; if firedamp, a highly flammable gas, hisses forth, one either suffocates or finds oneself buried under immense masses of rock and iron. Patrizia’s job is to keep this gas under control, and she therefore needs to walk the labyrinthine galleries, alone. Patrizia’s whole universe – her life’s experiences, her past, present and future – are enclosed in one single word: mine. In the bowels of the earth, a fearful but fascinating place in which the world is turned upside down, a place that changes the way one breathes, sees, and hears, things are in constant movement: struggles take place, feelings are born, and hopes emerge. Her newly found love, in fact, comes from underground. So as the seasons change among the ruins of the abandoned mines, patrizia guides us into most impenetrable places of the last one that’s still active, and into the souls and stories of her fellow workers.