Sub tuum praesidium

We both come from small villages in the Campania hinterland and we felt the need to recount our home places, focusing on our roots, indissolubly linked to a rural world fast approaching extinction. The idea was to enter the human sphere of people who still resist change, to ruminate on aspects such as religion (sincerely embraced in these places, often in spectacular form with the various votive demonstration of Christianity), the family (patriarchal, with adherence to hierarchies and unchanging values), the land and isolation of provincial life.  The film is a journey in which our characters acted as ferrymen leading us through the last dimension of existence. Our gaze is focused in particular on caregiving, a testimony to the humanity that, borne up by the ancestral values of coexistence, remains staunch in the face of the crises that afflict interpersonal relationships of contemporary society.  Care in this sense is at the heart of these values and becomes an expression of the characters’ dogged defiance of death and concomitant attachment to life. It is a care that extends from the human sphere, inevitably fleeting, to nature (virtually eternal).