Il lato grottesco della vita

The film studies the effects of tourism in the under-developed socio-economic world of the Sassi di Matera. The people in the film work as unofficial tourist guides; every day they walk the streets of their town talking to groups of people, who are often either distracted or dumbfounded. Above all they spend their days inventing ways to try to shake their townspeople from their provincial stupor and make their own extravagant ambitions come true. The common denominator is the lucid madness that makes their lives abstract and surreal.

"I was interested in the frail borderline between lucidity and madness, logic and creativity. When nothing has changed around you for centuries, like at Sassi di Matera, people tend to create their own worlds, made of imagination and obsessions. The people in the film live in a marginalized world that turns into a possibility for creating, re-interpreting, debunking - without distinctions between true and false. I tried to use an ironic and abstract viewpoint that could reflect the sense of eccentricity and solitude of the people, but also their extreme vitality." (F. Di Giacomo)