In the eyes of an artificial mind, the last thirty years of David Rumsey, spent amassing one of the biggest historical maps collection in the world he secretly calls his poem, seem like an unexplainable quest. It will follow him on a road trip confronting with the ghosts of his past and the end inching closer.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES:
When Amundsen and his crew planted their flag at the geographic South Pole, human adventure as it had always been conceived suddenly ceased to exist: the world had been explored. A great success for humanity, but at the same time a kind of subliminal tragedy. In the age of satellites, where the Earth can be explored with a smartphone and space travel has proven increasingly utopian, the human race has lost its Pillars of Hercules to overcome, the magic of an adventure in an unknown horizon.
In the beginning I wanted to make a film about this feeling, trying to understand how human beings had replaced this instinct which was part of the species from the first moments and which is present in all of us like a sort of stumped limb that still tickles. I read that sapiens probably succeeded in supplanting Neanderthals due to their ability to map territories and orient themselves effectively. I became passionate about maps. I found traces of that lost feeling there, in the old maps where in unknown lands you could see monsters and amazing drawings. And so I ended up on David Rumsey's website, an endless digital archive of historical maps, assembled with a particular taste. Doing some research I understood that it was one of the largest private collections of historical maps in the world, and from the first moment I thought that the aesthetic sense with which they followed one another was the work of an artist. When I saw that David had created his museum inside Second Life and that part of his work was also linked to technological advancements, I said to myself that I should get to know him.
It wasn't just his maps that fascinated me, but a whole series of implications linked to their quantity, to the amount of work that went into building such an archive. With a quick calculation I immediately realized that it was necessary to buy about fifteen historical maps a day for thirty years to reach those numbers, that only meticulous, constant, uninterrupted and obsessive work could be compatible with such a result. That the attention to metadata, descriptions and the order in which they were arranged on that platform was obsessive. That dealing for so long with a subject, cartography, largely neglected, completely replaced by automatic navigators, relegated to the dusty basements of museums, was a symptom of a great love. That the specimens contained in this archive were wonderful and that all this had been forgotten, neglected by the History of Art. Some of the maps in this archive were true masterpieces of human history, works that if they had been placed in the Louvre would have captured the attention of visitors for hours.
Once I met David and immediately established a very intense friendship and a great similarity in visions of the world and passions, I found in that very strange mission a ghost, a translation, a relocation of that original feeling that pushed men beyond the known world. In a sense my journey had come full circle and I was back to my starting point. In its history, in its archive, in its maps, I was able to see the ghost of that chimera which, materializing beyond the horizon, led human beings to great undertakings. David's work is certainly not compatible with the discovery of a continent, but it is imbued with that sense of exploration of the world, of the relationship with the unknown, of a bet paid with the time of one's life. In a world where the purpose of human beings seems chained to the laws of the market, popularity and success, dedicating one's existence to building an archive of a subject considered old and outdated is for me a symptom of a great connection with existence and the meaning of life.
What came out of this journey is a film about the sense of love for a purpose, for a subject, for a mission, however strange, about our absurd existence in the world. Antonio Morra and I decided to shoot this film using a single lens and narrating it with photography that resembled the reconnaissance of cartographers: a single shot for each scene, taken from what they called "point sublime", the point from which it is possible not only to see the territory better, but also to represent its beauty. The result is a film that reads like an atlas, in which the image is accompanied by the dialogues and the dissertation with the same relationship that exists between the icon and the caption. Sound follows a similar work, with the point of view of the scene always in between the camera and the protagonist, like a drone ear, listening to the adventure like a bedtime fairy tale.
Finally adopting the point of view of his satellite navigator, the story is told by an artificial intelligence that tries to question how the lives of men and their happiness are based on inexplicable chimeras and very strange personal missions, tracing the fundamental distance between man and any machine - and by deduction any concept - ever conceivable by capitalism.