Film Commission Torino Piemonte

We would like to make a "pastoral western," set in post-unification Italy, between the end of brigandage and early industrialization. An Italy to which Buffalo Bill's Circus had already brought the American myth of the West.

The conflicts that ran through our country were not so different from those in America recounted by so-called Revisionist Westerns: a time of instability, of new laws and new masters, a time of change, where the rules were few and confusing; a world of soldiers, guards, and outlaws. Italy of that period is a country at the dawn of modernity focused on profit, individualism, and bureaucracy that gradually takes the place of a deeply archaic, peasant, and feudal world.

The film is the story of Santino and Rosa's love and their desperate flight to nowhere seen through the ironic and deforming mirror of oral history in which the truth is always elsewhere, the facts never coinciding with their narrative. A murder makes Santino a hero to some, and an outlaw to others. Rosa is the only one who cares about the truth of the story, her story, until she realizes that this is not that important to others, because no one believes her. Rosa projects - even in a dreamlike way - her desires onto Santino: to love but also to hate, to emancipate herself, to escape and reinvent herself in escape.

Every hero is such as long as he holds up his story, whether true or false it is.