Io sono Sofia

Milan, august 2009. Four workers climb a 20 meters high gantry crane inside the hangar of the INNSE, the last active factory in Milan. They threaten to throw themselves down to stop the dismantling of the machineries and the closure of the factory they work in. The hangar is surrounded by dozens of policemen and supporters from all over Italy. It is not a simple struggle. They have a clear strategy. They have an organized army. They know perfectly their territory and their enemy. There are clear rules, it is a war with a workable paradigm for all forms of struggle.

A young woman and a voice on the phone in a cold, mountainous southern Italy. A thin line separates needs from desires and imagination from reality.

The Crater is a land of underdogs, indistinct space, constant noise. Rosario is a street vendor, a gitane of village fairs, who gives away soft toys to whoever draws a winning number. The war he has declared against his own destiny has the immature and indolent body of his thirteen-year-old daughter: Sharon is pretty and can sing, and in this hotbed of stopgaps and desperate living, she’s his weapon for survival. But success becomes an obsession, and talent becomes a punishment.

A hundred years of images researched and found, Fragments of film, family reels, pixels. A martyr saint, a warrior. Saint Efisio, an icon who moves the people. A holiday, a rite which repeats outside of time and brings with it the masks of dominations past and present, of an island; Sardinia. What escapes? What remains? Question and answer is the foundation of editing And renews the past in another past. In this encounter of deferred glances, the holy day is renewed again in memory and in dream, far from known places.

A trip with President Chavez over the largest oil reserve in the world, situated beneath the Orinoco river, becomes the occasion in which to enter into the lives of Venezuelans, nine years after the beginning of the Bolivarian revolution.Venezuela en route to socialism: is this still possible in our post-ideological times?