In the desolate rural landscape of Lucania, a community of peasants from the 1950s lives on in an indefinite time, while contemporary characters inhabit its ruins, disillusionedly surviving the end of the great dreams of the 20th century. The former struggle to establish a modern peasant civilisation, the latter face a post-rural future, dealing with the battles lost by previous generations among the farms of the Agrarian Reform villages that constellate the sinuous wheat hills. The cry of loneliness passes through song, which goes on to compose a polyphonic tale of episodes comparing different eras, in a movement of history that is first and foremost a geographical crossing, in a territory that is now depopulated but still fertile. The poetic word also takes shape in gestures, in the millenary practices of material culture, in the broken relationship with the State and in the broken dream of the industrial elsewhere.
Lost on a Lonely Crossroad originates from a long research journey across the rural landscape of Southern Italy. The main scope of the project is about cultural and social transformations through the second half of the twentieth century. The film is devoted to the short life of Rocco Scotellaro, symbol of a historic generational effort beneath the peasant world in dissolution. The main narrative engages in a dialogue between the heritage of such a civilization and the depopulated, disillusioned present time of contemporary Basilicata—a remote southern region brought to collective awareness after Carlo Levi’s literary masterpiece, "Christ Stopped at Eboli", published in 1945. The story opens toward the industrial elsewhere of Piedmont, a northern place of arrival and fracture, where the hope for collective redemption was lost. The modern ruins of the Turin factories thus become a mirror of another betrayed youth, creating an architectural visual counterpoint with the constellation of villages of the agrarian reform.
