In the heart of Basilicata, Nothing but the Wind tells the story of the daily lives of farmers and herders in the province of Potenza, like Incoronata and her son Giovanni, caught between tradition and contemporary change. Incoronata, 75, is still active on the farm and embodies the quiet resistance of a vanishing world. Around her, a web of close relationships sustains a rural community struggling against abandonment. Wind turbines dominate the landscape — the new masters of the land. They move in clusters, moan in the wind, flash in the night, and demand the land as their own. Like humans, they suffer, age, and die, leaving behind cemeteries of steel scattered through the inaccessible mountains. Hybrid and poetic, the film weaves together memories, desires, and visions, painting an intimate and political portrait of a land teetering between disappearance and survival.
Nothing but the Wind is born from a political, poetic, and personal ambition: to restore dignity and visibility to the silent and resilient lives of the farmers of Basilicata and their families, by filming their daily lives as a key to understanding the contemporary world. At a time when the rural world is often portrayed as a folkloric remnant or an area to be economically repurposed, the film seeks to offer a different perspective—a new space for listening. Through a cinematic approach attentive to human and landscape details, the documentary tells the story of a hardworking Italy with little wealth, largely ignored by institutions, the political sphere, and, more broadly, by the globalized economy—except as a source of productive exploitation. The farmers of Basilicata, passive spectators of fluctuating agricultural policies and informed—or disoriented—by television broadcasts, face the era of globalization and technological change with both courage and resignation.
