The Threat

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.

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.

Filmed entirely inside Civitavecchia prison, with the inmates themselves as protagonists and co-authors, Fortezza is the reinterpretation of one of the most important novels of the 1900s: The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati. Three soldiers arrive at a solitary military garrison which no longer serves any defensive function. Here, time is at a standstill and is marked by strict regulations, power dynamics, engrained idleness and habit. Waiting in vain for an enemy that will not arrive, the military officers are consumed by the need to give their stay meaning, and resist the attraction that this place holds for them.

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 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.

Sofia is 28 years old and a transgender woman. After hiding her body and her nature for many years, she makes the courageous choice to make her personal journey public and to share her questions with her family and friends.