“Carlo enjoyed pretending to be drunk, and I enjoyed filming him on our 8mm camera. The games we played were simple and naïve, which is what we were at the time.” The voice of Luca Verdone accompanies the first images of this sentimental journey into the life of his father, Mario. In the family home in Cantalupo, the Verdone siblings — Carlo, Luca and Silvia, together with Silvia’s husband Christian De Sica — come together to put their father’s archive in order; amidst the paintings, photographs and books, the memories begin to flow. Over the course of a heart-touching and intellectual documentary, a portrait emerges of a much-loved man and a multifaceted scholar, an expert of the avant-garde art of the 20th century, in particular Futurism.
Images and words narrate the story of Mario’s life: his childhood and adolescence spent in Siena; his passion for circus; the Venice Film Festival, for which he selected films; his time in Rome and his work at CSC. Finally, the bonds with that ancestral place in Sabina, filled with memories: from Christian De Sica’s declaration of love for his future wife Silvia, to Carlo’s up close and personal encounter with an elephant. It is the rediscovery of a fundamental figure in the history of cinema criticism, but also the portrait of an era when Italy became famous for its cinema.
“Mario Verdone was an extremely progressive thinker. He was neither short-sighted nor long-sighted. He could see both what was very close and what was very distant, that which belongs to the soul. And the soul of the world, as Hillman said, isn’t composed of youth or old age.” (Elio Pecora)