At the beginning of the 20th century, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show arrives in Rome to sell Italians the myth of the frontier, with blanks fired from rifles and cowboy shows. Here, in the setting of a legendary bronc riding competition between cowboys and Italian butteri (cattle herders), Rosa, the young wife of the local landowner, falls in love with Santino, the buttero who wins the challenge. Following her husband's murder, Rosa and Santino flee together, but justice, as always, is sold to the highest bidder, and a large bounty is placed on Santino's head. With Buffalo Bill on their trail, Rosa dreams of America, the real one, not the one in the advertising posters with bison, but her dream will have to reckon with reality. Because, as in every respectable western ballad, fate flips the coin. And often, the truth remains buried underground.
We would like to make a "pastoral western," set in post-unification Italy, between the end of brigandage and early industrialization. An Italy to which Buffalo Bill's Circus had already brought the American myth of the West.
The conflicts that ran through our country were not so different from those in America recounted by so-called Revisionist Westerns: a time of instability, of new laws and new masters, a time of change, where the rules were few and confusing; a world of soldiers, guards, and outlaws. Italy of that period is a country at the dawn of modernity focused on profit, individualism, and bureaucracy that gradually takes the place of a deeply archaic, peasant, and feudal world.
The film is the story of Santino and Rosa's love and their desperate flight to nowhere seen through the ironic and deforming mirror of oral history in which the truth is always elsewhere, the facts never coinciding with their narrative. A murder makes Santino a hero to some, and an outlaw to others. Rosa is the only one who cares about the truth of the story, her story, until she realizes that this is not that important to others, because no one believes her. Rosa projects - even in a dreamlike way - her desires onto Santino: to love but also to hate, to emancipate herself, to escape and reinvent herself in escape.
Every hero is such as long as he holds up his story, whether true or false it is.
Giacomo Lamborizio (Responsabile sviluppo)
Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Alessandro Borghi e John C. Reilly, Peter Lanzani, Mirko Artuso, Gabriele Silli e con la partecipazione di Gianni Garko
Festival de Cannes, 2025 Official Selection - "Un certain regard".