The Win is a documentary about an extraordinary lottery win that, in October 1998, forever altered life in Peschici, a small seaside town in southern Italy. At the “Millecose” newsstand, 99 shared tickets turned into 63 billion lire, one of the biggest jackpots of the time, when the Superenalotto was still new. Fishermen, office workers, factory workers, the unemployed, homemakers: it felt as though luck had reached an entire community in a place where unemployment exceeded 30 percent. For weeks, Peschici was in the national spotlight, celebrated as a town touched by fortune. Years later, the story looks different. The windfall failed to bring lasting peace of mind, leading to reckless choices, family conflicts, and expectations that faded over time. Drawing on present day interviews and archival footage from an era when money seemed to hold all the answers, the film revisits this unusual social fairy tale.
Once, talking about money was seen as unseemly. The poor blushed when it came up, the wealthy spent it freely and rarely mentioned it. Today, speaking about money reveals a clear contradiction: obsession with wealth goes hand in hand with the loss of any shared sense of value, for which money serves only as a stand in. Ethical, social, and collective value gives way to accumulation and competition. As in Vittorio De Seta’s "Islands of Fire", where nature shaped the daily lives of fishermen, along the Apulian coast the sea once stood as the sole source of livelihood. That balance held until the arrival of the lottery windfall. If wellbeing is tied to money, can it lead to happiness? The Win engages this question through the faces of its protagonists, shaped by time, whose stories are difficult to tell. The film becomes a collective narrative that moves beyond the ‘98 win to reveal a microcosm and its transformations, beginning with that so called stroke of luck that shaped many lives.
