May 2015, Rome.
Alessandra is diagnosed with breast cancer.
During the Magnetic Resonance test, Alessandra transforms the deafening sounds of the Resonance into music notes.
After the test, she informs her partner Tommaso that she wants to transform this dramatic experience into a creative project.
Alessandra is a lawyer as well as composer and singer. She devoted herself to musical research in the fields of jazz and experimental improvisation. Tommaso is an artistic producer, sound designer and musician. After the medical report, Alessandra decides to undergo surgery in Milan and, the day before she leaves, she prints her magnetic resonance finding and draws an arrow on it highlighting her cancer and adding the writing “I’m Not Here”.
With this leaflet she goes to the hospital and hands it over to doctors and nurses and informs them that she wants to transpose her thought in a creative project with the title “NOMA”, which in Greek means laceration and which is a piece of “"carcinoma”.
The surgery is successful but Alessandra loses her left breast. Tommaso is with her and supports her.
A long period of convalescence starts which they spend in Calabria, in the country house of Alessandra’s grandparents. The house is on a hill from where one can see the sea and where her mother is buried. She died of the same disease.
Alessandra starts her medical therapy here. The therapy makes her sick but, in the few moments in which she finds a bit of energy, she sits in the shadow of a pine tree and writes. Once back in Rome, Alessandra begins a cycle of post-op physical therapy to revive her arm mobility and restore her body to health. She gets a phone call from her Roman friend Lavinia who has moved and lives in Lanzarote, Canary Islands, who wants to know about Alessandra’s health. Lavinia proposes Alessandra to spend Christmas vacations in Lanzarote and to swop their houses in Rome and Lanzarote. Alessandra and Tommaso leave. The mild temperature and the sea view help Alessandra’s convalescence. With two backpacks, one PC, a few microphones and a synthesizer they start composing and recording, during their stay, two music pieces involving some members of the Canary Islands Brass Band. From here Alessandra starts her physical and mental recovery.
Back in Rome, Alessandra and Tommaso decide to continue their musical journey of strength and healing, therefore, they let out their house and leave for Turin. They find a house with a big cellar where a portable studio is assembled and where the first recordings are made which involve different artists and musicians of the Turin and Italian underground music stage. In this way, they record other 8 pieces, making a “Concept Album”: an original soundtrack the lyrics of which tell the tough experience of cancer transposed in music.
However, Alessandra does not stop writing, she collects in a detailed diary the moments of everything which happened to her in this beginning of her “second life” and turns this peculiar experience in a short-story: a human and musical journey of rebirth, an ensemble embrace among survivors. In the ending a live concert with all the musicians who participated with their hearts and talent in the making of NOMA.
NOMA is a wish come true: a book, a soundtrack, a film.