There are people the past insists on keeping, and Manlio has been one of them since that morning in May 1974. Big in Japan tells his story, the story of a man who finds himself thrown into another dimension of space and time, thrown out of his present to meet the ghosts of his own trauma, in the hope of overcoming the tragedy to which he has been nailed for all his life. A tragedy inscribed in the dark and still open wound of the unpunished neo-fascist massacres. Abandoned by his fate on the twentieth floor of a large hotel in Tokyo, Manlio waits for the past to strike again, in the illusion, perhaps, that something is yet to come, in return for all the pain he went through.
Big in Japan, based on a real story, arises to tell the story of an impossible encounter, touched upon thanks to Manlio’s courage, imagination, and extraordinary humanity. I have spent a lot of time in courtrooms since I was a child: when I heard the story of Manlio I realized that he was seeking something that went beyond the courtroom procedures so familiar to me. He wanted something that would put the pieces of a deep fracture, both personal and collective, together again. And I knew I had to tell his story.
Francesca Riccardi (Responsabile Sviluppo)