Casa delle Visioni

For more than one hundred years, the Swiss Social Democratic Party and the trade unions shaped Swiss working-class culture. In the seventies, this culture completely collapsed. The working class of yesteryear are called foreigners. An essay by an immigrant child from a former working class stronghold.

Maria, a Mexican migrant, is pregnant. Her husband Giorgio is sterile. She conceals the pregnancy from him out of fear he might suspect infidelity. Caught between doubt and longing, both seek tenderness elsewhere. Fascinated by the unknown, their feelings drive them into the depths of love. There, where only trust can prevent them from losing one another.

What remains of the Island of Ischia and the Villa? What remains of these landscapes in which Luchino Visconti, icon of the cinema, lived and dreamed so often?
He declared, probably referring mischievously to the Italy of his time, that "you should never stop building your house... "
What remains of his loved ones, of those who like him resisted fascism and its potential and threatening return? The film will explore this legendary place, through the emptiness of the villa and its abandoned, decrepit but still present walls, reminiscent of the effervescence of the ideas and projects developed in that place.
By returning to the island of Ischia, by finding the house as it is today, by reviving it as it was during the time of Visconti, thanks to images of the present, archival documents, and by making links with the aestheticism of his films, we will discover the filmmaker in a singular way.

During the late 1960s, Emilio Sidoti, an elementary school teacher in Albisola, decided to make some movies with his students in order to develop their critical gaze in a free and radical expressive pathway. This was the start of “Cinema dei ragazzi,” Italy's first experience of “school and cinema;” it generated over twenty movies, all shot in Super8, and most of them were entirely written, directed, and edited by the children. Starting with the material of the time, this unique experience is put into relation with the present time, as the children of back then - who today are adults - are asked to recount the impression it left on them.