Hugo in Argentina

New technologies are transforming a 19th-century watchmaking town in Switzerland. Josephine, a young factory worker, produces the unrest wheel, swinging in the heart of the mechanical watch. Exposed to new ways of organizing money, time and labor, she gets involved with the local anarchist movement.

At the end of their sabbatical year backpacking around the world, four backpackers find themselves adding an unexpected stop among palm trees and snow-capped alpine peaks on a tropical island in the middle of a Swiss lake.

Ticino is not the epicentre of fashion, but between the 1930s and the 1960s, it had a fashion designer who achieved national and international success. The Luganese Elsa Barberis dressed the modern woman taking shape in those years, anticipating and inspiring the fashion of the decades to follow. But all this was not enough. Elsa has been completely forgotten by our memory. How is it possible that a talented figure like hers fell into oblivion so quickly?

The title 'The desire to be useless' recalls a famous Hugo Pratt's expression and contains a double meaning. On one hand, it representes the comic's claim as an art form, long considered marginal but elevated, but by Pratt was considered a language with high literary and artistic value. On the other, it expresses a life philosophy founded on freedom, on the rejection of reducing existence to fiction or to commodity, and on the possibility of the adventure and the unexpected. Containing interviews with Patrizia Zanotti, Dominique Petitfaux, Thierry Thomas e Marco Steiner, the documentary completes a cinematic research lasted twenty years, returning Hugo Pratt as one of the most important auhor of illustrated literature and an artist still capable of being received by the contemporary audience.

When Hugo Pratt passed away in 1995, he was holding an Ethiopian cross in his left hand. In order to understand his enduring love of the black continent, Hugo Pratt’s companion, Jean Claude Guilbert, together with a group of like-minded people, searches for traces of him in the Horn of Africa. Thanks to their efforts and invaluable audiovisual archive material, a new picture of this remarkable artist and his attitude towards Africa begins to emerge.