Sensi Contemporanei Cinema e Audiovisivo

100 years ago, a terrible earthquake, followed by an equally terrible tidal wave, devastated and largely destroyed Messina and Reggio Calabria.

A short story about isolation and depression, mixed with a fake documentary interview.

Inside a warehouse in Palermo, a group of people smashes a man’s arm to pieces with a wheelie bag packed with weights. This is the method used by an amateur criminal organization that fractures the limbs of its willing victims before staging fake accidents and raking in the insurance payouts. Vincenzo recruits the individuals from among the down-and-outs that haunt the city streets, where Luisa is a habitué, since she gets her crack there. Vincenzo’s problems suddenly get worse, though, after a series of mistakes shut him out of the gang, and Luisa is now his only chance: he convinces her to have her bones broken.

It has been almost thirty years since Filippo Dobrilla started to sculpt a giant male nude inside a cave 650 metres deep in the Apuan Alps. This almost inaccessible place has jealously protected his secret: his youthful passion for a fellow climber, a passion Filippo was only able to indulge in here in the intimacy of this cave. Even after it was over and ever since then, Filippo has been returning regularly to the cave to work on the most important sculpture of his life, a masterpiece no one will see.

Set in a country church on a hot August day is an ironic and crude analysis and staging of the unwritten laws of prejudice and of meanness, in the society of appearance. In the perspective of "do it but do not say", the micro-stories of all the characters are alternated with the omnipresent co-protagonist of the story: the heat. The young bride, the greedy priest, the hedonist nun, the old women of the village, the femme fatale, the witnesses of the spouses, the relatives, the various guests and the groom himself tell with twists and sympathetic snapshots of almost Pirandellian humor timeless history where the clichés of a corrupt and indifferent society parade on the notes of the wedding march.

Escape from home, from the neighborhood. Then a letter written to his mother to apologise, to alleviate the sense of guilt. This is how, through autofiction, the director's past is scanned before our eyes in clear, inflammatory images. A train journey that becomes an inner journey to rework memories, to choose what to take and what to let go.