Calabria, southern Italy. The hospital in the town of Cariati has been closed for more than 10 years because of budget cuts, and an entire area has been in a perennial state of health emergency. Also on a national level, what has always been considered the best public healthcare in the world is in tragic decline. From long before the advent of the Covid.
Cataldo and Mimmo are two guys of the association Le Lampare, which has been fighting for the Vittorio Cosentino since November 2020: it is the first time in Italy that someone occupies a hospital. Despite the interest of the media, the institutions remain silent. Their only hope seems to be the support of Gino Strada, the founder of Emergency.
Michele (70) is the former medical director of the hospital of Cariati. Vittorio Cosentino is his home, and not even now that he is retired he is able to abandon the battle he has been fighting for decades: to reopen it, giving back to his country the dignity and well-being it had lost and to tens of thousands of people the right to free medical care as established by the Constitution.
The heroic story of the occupation is intertwined with the global interests of Big Pharma, the pandemic emergency, the dark side of the race to privatise essential services. The unconventional voices of Roger Waters, Jean Ziegler and Ken Loach reveal a world in which politics gives way to the power of economics.
Characters with different stories and paths end up meeting on a common goal: to remind the world that in healthcare the profit of the private, if you have no choice, is a crime.