Sulla terra leggeri (Weightless)

Opening film

Gian, a sixty-five-year-old ethnomusicology professor, struggles with the darkness caused by sudden amnesia. Haunted by fragments of the past, which emerge in his mind like grainy archival images, he receives a diary written by him at the age of twenty from his daughter Miriam, whom he treats like a stranger. Gian realizes that everything revolves around Leila, the Franco-Tunisian woman with whom he discovered love in the span of a single night. Who is this woman who was so important in his life? How is it possible that he forgot her? This investigation reawakens his memory, taking him back to the primary scene of the film, one of mourning celebrated among the oriental notes of scented tea and flower-shaped sweets. Through his past selves and thanks to his deep love for the woman, Gian finds the strength to rediscover himself as a father and accept himself as a widower, facing the most difficult challenge: accepting the loss of someone and learning how to find them again.

«Sulla terra leggeri is a film about loss and the sometimes desperate attempt to recover what has been lost: memory, a love, but also an era from the past—evoked through archives with their silent and real characters who, before Gian, loved, lost, cried, laughed, and lived—and a mythical horizon, conjured through ancient rituals, capable of creating a familial dialogue between the living and the dead, giving a collective and cosmic meaning to individual destinies.

The absence of memory generates a phantasmagoria of images and open-eyed hallucinations in Gian. Memory causes a change, an apparition, an epiphany. The key word that guided me is: fragmentation. The sudden eruption of fragmented images and flashes manages to convey his confusion, allowing the viewer to witness this process of deterioration. There is something tied to the feeling that an era is fading away, along with a way of loving. Because when someone leaves, it’s not just that person who dies; an entire world, an era, dies with them. And the archive represents that era. That’s why it’s so important to connect the narrative to the texture of the archive.»

– Sara Fgaier