A slightly rundown van weaves through various neighborhoods of Rome. On board is Stefano, a social worker who, between jokes with Sandro, the driver, picks up the clients of the cooperative he works for—people with disabilities, both physical and cognitive, and those struggling with mental health challenges. The van's destinations vary: a room in the Caritas facility within Villa Glori, located in the central Parioli district; a parish hall in San Lorenzo; or the day center in the dense, multicultural outskirts of the working-class neighborhood of Tor Sapienza.
It is in these spaces that Stefano, along with Irene, an actress committed to social work, carries on with his “Backward Theater.” And yes, because if moving forward in a theater project where the actors face short-term memory loss, autism, psychosis, mental impairments, tetraplegia, hydrocephalus, atrophies, and a variety of syndromes isn't easy, the solution isn't to stop—just to move backward.
But only seemingly. Stefano’s true aim is to ignite, through theatrical activities, the potential for awareness, creativity, and storytelling in individuals who, due to circumstances and conditions, may have lost touch with these aspects of their essence.
Stefano is working with various groups. In Tor Sapienza and Villa Glori, they have just begun their workshops, focusing on theatricality rather than theater; theatricality as an evocative space and an individual poetic act. A ritual moment through which intense communication is created, based on sharing and self-narration. These elements later become integral parts of performances when the group decides to turn a workshop into a full-fledged play. This is the case with the group in San Lorenzo, where Irene and Stefano have reached an advanced stage and are about to debut a proper show—not just for friends and family but for a real audience in a small theater in the city center. They bring the dedication and passion of seasoned theater directors, holding their actors to high standards.
Thus, the workshop becomes the space and time for genuine rehearsals with an artistic company. Rehearsals with “actors” Elisabetta, Luigi, Alessandra, and Daniele alternate with the day center workshops, where Barbara, Cinzia, Daniele, Mario, Marco, Rosaria, Benedetta explore the depths of themselves through theater, bringing their ideas, memories, creativity, autism, delays, syndromes, fantasies, anxieties, joys, forgetfulness, psychoses—all in a whirlwind of art and disability, of gestures and madness, moving backward to make new progress. Guided by Stefano, who absorbs everything, stimulates them, leads them, involves them, only to reveal himself, in the end, to be less invulnerable than he initially seemed...

Director's note

Full Speed Backward! is an intimate look into a hidden world—that of disability and mental distress. A world often talked about and represented but ultimately little known in its day-to-day reality.
Even today, only those who live in this submerged world day after day truly understand it. And day after day, they try to narrate it and make sense of it, for example, through theater and theatrical relationships. The theater workshops led by Stefano, the protagonist, are the core of the story, the narrative thread that unveils this world. Stefano is determined not to stage yet another integrated theater experience with a capital “T”: he is not a director, and the clients are not actors. There are no auditions to pass, nor is there a choice between one client and another, as clients themselves do not choose but are assigned by the social services network.
What Stefano and Irene aim to create is a theater with a lowercase “t,” where the process of preparation and the way the performance is built take center stage. This leads to the paradox that the real show is the rehearsals themselves, and the opening night becomes just another rehearsal—perhaps the first one from which a new preparation begins. In the Backward Theater, there is no straightforward progress. And it is not an easy path.
Full Speed Backward! is a story of marginalization, both physical and mental peripheries, dark places inside and out, of immense effort, suffering, and scarce resources. But it is also a story of creativity, resilience, social action, and an unyielding zest for life.