At this moment in his life the man with the camera is afraid. Yes, he is as afraid as ever of his present. Beyond a violent growth of social inequalities and the spread of authoritarianism, reality has been gradually turning into a fiction at a distance. The old forms of struggle and solidarity have become frayed. Deprived of a vision that goes beyond next week, of a project that is not just individual, we no longer know what “the social value of a soothed pain” is, what “the value of a saved life” is. And, thus, in a daily tug-of-war with himself, in a state of painful suspension, the man with the camera decides not to wait motionless and tries to seek an answer to a question that can no longer be postponed: is there a world to come?

The film has the ambition and at the same time the humility to tell first and foremost about its own bewilderment and search. Searching for why it is so difficult for us humans to live together, to be lives that recognize themselves in something they have in common, in a horizon that transcends their individual specificity. To be communities where there are no poor or abandoned people, adrift. That is why we went to places where some people, by the mere means of goodwill, try to make up for these material and emotional deprivations, lacks of food and hugs. Not to “document” poverty as a social phenomenon - the aim of numerous works since the issue of the scandalous coexistence of misery and opulence emerged in Europe and the U.S. in the 1960s - but to observe the health of human relationships, to look at the faces of communal breakdown. Not, therefore, to “denounce” a social issue, but to question society itself.

Director
Paolo Santolini
Story
Paolo Santolini, Fabio Anibaldi
Screenplay
Paolo Santolini
Director of photography
Paolo Santolini
Film Editor
Jacopo Quadri
Original Music
Billy Martin
Sound
Maximilien Gobiet
Altri credits

Giulia Cosentino (Ricerche d'archivio); Natalia Raguseo (Colorist); Fabrizio Nastasi (Coordinatore postproduzione).

Organizzatore generale
Francesca Vittoria Bennett
Producer
Paolo T. Benzi
Production
Okta Film
con il sostegno di Film Commission Torino Piemonte - Piemonte Doc Film Fund - sviluppo dicembre 2024
Last update: 03 March 2025