Lucio (30) lives on the outskirts of Turin. He works as a caretaker and handyman at an illegal used car dealership, located in a multi-story car parking. He sleeps inside a car, after separating from his partner, with whom he has a daughter. In his current situation, on the margins of society, he is unable to take care of them. One day, his boss introduces him to Hassan, an elderly Moroccan who needs a helper to take a load of stolen solar panels across the French border. Lucio decides to take this chance to earn some money. But things don’t go as planned: the destination becomes more and more distant day by day, until Lucio finds himself becoming Hassan’s bodyguard on a journey to the Moroccan Sahara, where they are supposed to sell the jeep they’re traveling in to the desert Bedouins. For Lucio, it will be a risky journey full of changes, leading him to discover an unknown world and to learn that the future is not written.
Oltre il deserto is an initiatory journey that will lead Lucio to break the boundaries of his closed world and to venture towards the desert. He will be forced to take care of his old travelling companion, while experiencing new and unexpected horizons. Thanks to this, Lucio will gradually discover in himself a vital force he does not know to have.
For Oltre il deserto I was inspired by stories and real situations that I experienced both in Italy and Morocco, where I worked during these last years as a documentary filmmaker. I want to make this fiction film to develop the topic of the rebirth, the possibility of changing ourselves into new ones.
This is my first feature fiction after fifteen years as a documentary filmmaker and producer.