"JULIA MY DEAR! GIORGIO." So begin and end the letters that the famous director Giorgio Strehler wrote to actress Giulia Lazzarini, before or after a performance. The last recommendations, the last nods of love and fear for his actors. Then Giulia is left alone on stage, she and her characters. The film starts from this elective dialogue between the director and one of the most important actresses on the Italian scene. Giulia is a woman of the theater. Theater is her life.
The film chronicles the behind-the-scenes ordeal of reading Strehler's letters, a powerful, neverbefore- used film material with which to make an intimate and profound portrait of her through the words of her master.
We enter Giulia's house, for the first time, the laboratory space, where the actress prepares, where she gathers information, emotions and processes them. A house full of things from the past and present. The same one for more than forty years, in Milan.
Along with the letters Giulia returns to bring to life fragments of memorable monologues referenced in the correspondence: Beckett, Shakespeare, Jouvet, Ginzburg, Brecht.
In her characters, Giulia is able to embody all angles of human beings, from the kindest to the most violent. This makes her the actress capable of embodying Strehler's "theatrical humanism" and giving the audience, even today, an extraordinary stage essence.
From this interweaving of rehearsals, letters, and monologues, the script of the film is being created.
The house and together the Piccolo Teatro in Milan are populated with ghosts, pushing to come back to life with expressive force. Posters hang everywhere on the walls, the walls of the stage seem to come alive again, creating a film made of voices and evocative images.
Footage of rehearsals never seen before thus appears. An unseen treasure trove of how a character, a gesture, a word is built to reach the soul of the viewer. A fierce passion that grants no respite toward greatness. Lights and shadows. 'Theater is the parable of the world,' Strehler writes her. The story centers on this connection between art and life, in search of the secret of the craft of theater and its ability to represent the human being.
The film closes with a journey through the streets of Milan. We get lost in the urban night, in a din of sounds and silences. The sequence of the city's many theaters, emblems of its cultural life and creative fervor, accompanies us in this suspended and dreamlike 'road movie' in the night lights of the early hours of the day.