Val Grande, Italy's largest wilderness area, for more than 15 years was home to Gianfranco Bonaldo, known to everyone as Gianfry, the barefoot hermit. After his death, caused by strychnine poisoning, a camera has been found. The footage, shot by himself, is about his wild life. Starting with this precious footage, the documentary aims to reconstruct his life from a harsh and difficult childhood to his days as a hermit, finding his redemption and peace among the streams, rocks, and woods that Gianfry called home, when he chose to give a second chance to the child he had never been able to be.
Gianfranco Bonaldo's, is the story of an eccentric life lived in a wild place, but also the story of making peace with a difficult past. Gianfry, indeed, against all odds, was able to react to the violence he was exposed to by finding his second chance in the wildest place. Loneliness, fatigue, silence, and nature are the elements of a story that has become a tragic fairy tales; thanks to the images he himself filmed and the testimonies of those who knew him, we will try to reconstruct his journey in search of freedom: the freedom that one feels in the boundless spaces of the wilderness, but also the freedom that frees one from a past of violence and allows one to escape from the patterns imposed by society.