It’s the year 1994 and Sergio Morlaghi, a Milanese painter who hides something in his past, goes back to the countryside he had left a quarter of a century before with a one-way ticket.
His story weaves with those of Bruna, a bartender who was an old flame of his, of Luca and Lisca, two young friends who are looking for a change in their life, of George, a stage director who found a new dimension along the pebbly shore of the Sesia river and of Marta and Flo, two travelling funfair workers.
But the real protagonists are in the background.
First, the floodplain of northern Italy flanking the Sesia river with its rice fields, a land that received in the late 1960s, with the arrival of herbicides, a shock from which it never recovered.
Then, what was left in the ‘90s of its inhabitants, the survivors of a rural civilization that remained almost unchanged through the centuries to suddenly collapse and fade away with a few years lasting agony.
And also a small wooden box, that will give to an apparently mental defective the important task to remember and to pass on to the next generations, as the plot also gives some suggestions about the role that theater and video works have in the preservation of the memory of a lost age, using, in this case, the last of its real characters and making them play in their shoes.
The narration develops through the intertwining of two temporal frames (1994 and 2018), astonishingly shot without any reconstruction because of the unfortunate episodes that damaged a production that reached its end only after a 25 years lasting break.