Based on a series of newspaper articles about southern Italian peasant life, published in the 1940s by the writer Francesco Jovine, but set in contemporary rural Italy, the film seeks the same ties that the essayist explored: those that bind man to land.

It is a fairy tale suspended between the past and the present, at times poetic in tone, at times bitter. Aside from the writer-narrator, the protagonists are a young farmer, a geography professor, a herd of cows, two brothers from India and several young Afghani men living at a farm that has been turned into a temporary center for refugees.