Altara Films

"Letters from Europe" brings to light the words of men and women who gave their lives resisting the Nazi and fascist conquest from 1939 to '45 across the European continent. The moving goodbyes penned by a few of those sentenced to death are sometimes true spiritual testaments that explore the meaning of civic responsibility, human existence, fraternity, and life and death. Their words, which the film mingles with footage of the present day, can perhaps restore meaning to a humanist ideal and to the ever-changing idea of a united Europe.

Bernard just retired. He is 63 years old. He lives alone with his two cats and decides to move in the house where he will live the last chapter of the book of his life. While packing, he starts to have to choose what to take with him. Bernard is my master and I am his slave. His last lover. I help him put away his whip in a box, between the remains of his memory, tokens of lovers stripped from his arms by AIDS, traces of a foster family that pushed him away, of a rigid education that marked him, of a mother and a father that he never met. Our sexual games are the possibility for two generations to meet: between a whip and a leather harness we discuss love, death, the AIDS epidemic of the 80s, his new life project, us. The wounds and the grave goods of a survivor, a cry of life under the lights of sexual pulsions.

The story of Piero, now an old man in Vermont, who recalls his time in a violent fascist Italian militia in World War II. Powerful, captivating and above all rare interview with someone who has been silent about his dark past, but now feels to need to reflect critically on his actions as a teenager.

Livorno, Italy, summer 1984. In the birthplace of Amedeo Modigliani, famous for the merciless irony of its inhabitants, the innocent joke of three young students turns into the hoax of the century, destined to provoke an earthquake in the entire art world. In a single night, the teenagers carve a “Modigliani style” head with an electric drill. The next day, the find of the sculpture is incredibly recognized by critics and art historians as a fantastic discovery that “sheds a new light on the work of the Master”. The news reverberates everywhere, attracting visitors, journalists and tv crews from around the world…

An underground but mighty river links the cities of Carrara in Tuscany and Barre in Vermont. It is a river through which flow art, history and memory. But above all it is a river that carries with it the tragic epic of an entire community of emigrants from all over Europe engaged in the everlasting and titanic struggle against stone. A river that rises from the quarries of the Apuan Alps, where Michelangelo used to go to obtain the blocks of marble for his masterpieces. And that finds its outlet in the American state of Vermont, amidst dramatic social battles and deaths by freezing, amidst the sorrow of emigration and the splendor of the art of sculpture, amidst anarchic utopia, hope and tragedy.

Taranto, southern Italy, 20XX AD. A sound artist records echoes and radio interference among bunkers and abandoned construction sites. An elderly blind man lives in a utopian commune, tends a vegetable garden, and quotes Dostoevsky. A restless woman wanders the woods with a black pitbull, performs rituals, draws torments, and dreams of explosions. These things never happened, but they always are. He explores industrial ruins and invisible worlds around Europe's largest steel district, portraying a human landscape suspended between disaster and beauty.