Synopsis
Ascoli Satriano, Puglia. A small inland town. A place where “there is nothing here”, as everyone tells Eleonora, who has arrived from Milan after many years — Milan, the place where “everything is there”, where her parents moved in the 1960s. A migrant not by choice, a second-generation migrant, she returns to give an image to words that are not her own: those of her family and those of Adele, the girl she met on the only trip south she made as a child. With her she begins an impossible dialogue, out of sync with time and in a space that is largely imaginary.
Director's note
The film was born from the desire to explore my family’s town of origin, a place known more through stories, memories and letters than through direct experience. As the daughter of a family that migrated to northern Italy during the years of the economic boom, I returned to Ascoli Satriano to confront that imagined place with the community’s present-day life. Adele’s letters, received during childhood and left almost unanswered, become the thread of a first-person account in which family memory, the myth of the distant hometown and observation of the present intertwine, without nostalgia, with the transformation of an Italy that moved from countryside to industrialisation.