Michelangelo Frammartino

In August 1961, speleologists from Italy’s booming North arrive on a Calabrian plateau where time stands still. The intruders discover one of the world’s deepest caves, the Bifurto Abyss, under the gaze of an old shepherd, the only witness of the pristine territory.

Sergio Cortesi dedicated his life to solar observation. At the “Specola solare” in Locarno, between 1957 and 2021, he made over 15.000 sunspots drawings, driven by the faith of a monk to whom his own god never gave an answer.

An elderly farmer befriends a woman whose family believe is possessed.

An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes to find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.

One woman works at the municipal desk where Roman residents voice their grievances. The other at the speech therapy clinic in Naples. One listens; the other helps patients speak. Both work with the spoken word. Both are nearing retirement: the start of one long Sunday, instead of that weekday punching of the clock, inside offices, inside rooms. What was that weekly Sunday in their lives, if not an open space of truly creative activity, free from the office worker’s bane of unproductivity? If not a time for active listening, in the neighborhood, getting together at odd hours, an unplanned field of possibility? Away from that tame, sleep-walking environment of the pay check and the limits it places on one’s goals? By comparing the active, voluntary Sunday and the passive, enforced Sunday – and those who lived before the Sunday of Italian tradition and those after, this film attempts to speak all the languages of Sunday.

For Filmmaker Film Festival (2023), Fulvio Baglivi and Cristina Piccino asked some filmmakers (R. Beckermann, J. Bressane, D’Anolfi/Parenti, T. De Bernardi, L. Di Costanzo, A. Fasulo, F. Ferraro, M. Frammartino, S. George, ghezzi/Gagliardo, C. Hintermann, G. Maderna, A. Momo, A. Rossetto, M. Santini, C. Simon, S. Savona) to give us their own "lost road," that is, a sequence, scene or piece of editing that did not later find its way into the final version of one of their works. Each fragment has its own accomplished presence, often has a different title from the film it was made for, which is not necessary to have seen in order to find meaning; on the contrary, those who set out thinking they know the world they are walking through will find themselves displaced.