April 1499. The duke of Ferrara has sent his men to Viterbo to smuggle away from her monastery Lucia, a twenty‐year‐old ‘living saint’, renowned all over Italy for her stigmata.
The young courtier Zoanin and the captain of the ducal crossbowmen escort her, all the while hiding from the people of Viterbo, who are pursuing them. During the journey through woods and abandoned villages, Zoanin will have to decide the young woman’s destiny.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES:
This story took place five centuries ago, but I think it is still relevant today, because it deals with the lies we tell ourselves when trying to make sense of what happens.
I believe that one should always start from the unrepeatable specificities of a story, in order to make it universal. That is why I heavily rely on the documents, trying to lay out all their details and singularities. In this case, I took sentences directly from Lucia’s letters and autobiography.
Every character uses a different dialect, which shows his origin and the path of his life. But the
documents did not just guide the words; they influenced the choice of the locations, the costumes, and they even informed the casting: the crossbowmen’s captain is also the historian (and my father) who studied Lucia’s travel and told me about the most enigmatic aspects of her life.
I then sought the imperfections of the image: the noise from the grain, the effect of vintage optics, a camera that is always one step behind the characters and is therefore unable of anticipating their movements. I needed all of this to try and recreate the opaque filter that is always between us and the reality we try to capture.