A mother dies and her son Alessandro (47) sets off. A vigilant nature follows his steps through a desert scattered with cemeteries, where plastic flowers resist time. Beneath the surface lie fragments of the past: the childhood house, now inhabited by his father Carlo (85), who lives like a hermit, collecting flowers and placing them on his wife’s grave. Around them, the beauty of the depopulated Apennines. During the journey, Alessandro understands that his mother’s death has revealed his father’s hidden sensitivity, the traumas of war, the fragility and strength of a man left alone. The aridity of the desert echoes the slow emptiness of his homeland. Images of the past resurface: what do they ask to reveal? Distance opens a passage that unites father and son in an invisible dance between places sharing the same fate. When Alessandro returns, they recognise each other. Standing by the summer sea, they realise that everything has changed.
After my mother's death, the house of my childhood becomes a desert of memories, but also the place where I rediscover my father: a fragile and tenacious emotional presence, the last bastion of a world which is gradually falling apart. For me, leaving and choosing the desert means embarking on a spiritual journey, searching for a landscape in which to find myself. This choice was guided by Patricio Guzmán's film Nostalgia of the light, in which the desert is revealed to be fertile ground, capable of generating profound inner transformations. In Atacama and Argentina’s Puna, the driest places in earth, I am building a bridge: the presence of cemeteries and abandoned mines become a device capable of connecting me with the complexity of the Apennine territory and its increasingly empty villages. This project answers a question left unanswered in my previous film, "Trembling Crystals": what lies beyond the void left by my mother? Perhaps a relationship to be discovered, a bridge to be built between a father and a son, and between fragments of memory and what remains afterward.
Director
Alessandro Focareta
Screenplay
Alessandro Focareta
Director of photography
Jaime Guerra, Alessandro Focareta
Original Music
Ernesto Romeo, Victoria Barca, Agustina Crespo
Altri credits
Alessia Petitto (Archive Producer); Alejandro de la Fuente (Story Editor)
Cast and characters
Carlo Focareta, Alessandro Focareta
Executive production
Cesar Emil Rodriguez Garabot
Producer
Alessandro Focareta, Cesar Emil Rodriguez Garabot, Alejandro de la Fuente
