Museo Nazionale del Cinema

In 1999, on the occasion of the centenary of Ellington's birth, Franco Maresco commissioned Steve Lacy to perform ten songs by the Duke, which were recorded and filmed in Palermo. In 2024, twenty years after Lacy's death and fifty years after that of Ellington, that unpublished material re-emerges from the archive of the great Sicilian director and becomes a documentary.

A short film that reinterprets the silent film masterpiece "Cabiria" from 1914, directed by Giovanni Pastrone and enriched with literary captions by Gabriele D'Annunzio, thanks to the integration of digital technologies such as virtual reality, Artificial Intelligence, and the powerful 3D graphics engine Unreal Engine.

A collective archive film, made with the contribution of unpublished images from some of the main archives of different territorial origins, between Lazio, Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy and Emilia Romagna. A journey through time and space: through small cameras, partisans, soldiers, priests and "ordinary citizens" felt the need to document for future memory - and, in some cases, at their own risk - History "as it happens", but also the long waits and daily life that intersect with the events of the two-year period 1943-45. And then the Liberation: the arrival of the Allies, the joy, the dances and finally it's time to get married.