Through the testimonies of young activists and agricultural workers from southern Italy - who have built and experienced at first hand the political journey of Aboubakar Soumahoro from his first struggles as a trade unionist to his election to Parliament - we retrace - in a sort of collective self-analysis and meta-narrative - the profound desire for representation - of the 'invisible ones'. From the active hope for the rise of an Afro-descendant deputy capable of carrying the demands of the most vulnerable to the terrible media pillory experienced by their own representative and the effects of his vertiginous fall, we question ourselves - through emotional testimonies, personal and public archives - on the state of health of those who from being "represented" have found themselves "orphaned" of a spokesperson.
A hymn to political commitment that seeks in the hope of the marginalised - beyond any symbol - an answer to real needs. From the demand for the most basic rights - work, greetings, citizenship - to the inescapable right to happiness.
The film project Anatomy of a Dream starts from the desire to restore dignity to the feeling of "hope". To redeem it from the allure of naïveté that is thought to be congenital to it, and to recount it in its complexity - so human. The sentiment I speak of is the one I encountered among the activists who built Aboubakar Soumahoro's leadership - a sentiment cultivated, exalted, channelled and finally destroyed. Perhaps betrayed or just dissipated. Aboubakar Soumahoro's candidacy was 'radically revolutionary': a black man, Afro-descendant, who from working in the fields as a picker became, thanks to a brilliant path between study and commitment, a point of reference for a maximalist social and political activism.
In Soumahoro's first meetings in the popular agoras and later throughout the election campaign, what I was able to meet around him is an Italy that wants to believe in an inclusive, altruistic, solidarity-based, egalitarian society. What happened to his political figure - metaphorically killed - is not only a damage to his person, but a damage to an entire part of society that believed in him. And in this dynamic the documentary can be a necessary counter-narrative, but also an instrument of a simple question: "what remains of the hope of the last ones?"
Margot Mecca (Responsabile sviluppo)
Aboubakar Soumahoro; Mosé Vernetti; Francesca Zurlo; Sambare Soumaila; Alfa Berry; Zare Issa; Kone Moussa