Every year in Sardinia, the summer is swept away by the strong Mistral wind and the first rains of September and October. Along with it, kiosks, parasols, sunbeds, canoes, surfboards, sunscreens, small boats and deck chairs disappear. The sea rises, it gets rough, the air gets cooler, the plastic chairs are piled up in the wooden kiosks just behind the beaches and the outdoor tables are removed. This year is no different.
Researchers and volunteers try to glue together the fragments scattered here and there by increasing mass tourism. The sea tries to take back what belongs to it, for the short time we let it. Everything becomes more intimate, private and cosy.
What Remains When the Sea Moves is a film that begins when the sea moves, at the end of Summer, and ends when the sea calms down and tourists return to the coasts. It is a film about dreams and expectations, failed promises, and the uncertain future of a working class on whom politics has placed the burden of the whole economy.
The images tell us about the sea during this time frame, far from the spotlights on the island in Summer. The media mix as if to confuse the specific space and historical time where we are.
What Remains When the Sea Moves is a film about a strip of land surrounding the island, it is a film about seasonal work at a time when other people are not working, the reverse shot of Summer. But it is also the story of a disputed space on the border between land and sea.

Director's note

The idea for this film did not come at a specific moment in time, but is part of a process of research into media, images, the collective imagination and observation of colonial processes in some peripheral territories.
For almost ten years, much of my work has focused on archives, in the broadest sense.
Right after Covid, mass tourism seems to have entered a new phase, hypermediated by images and social media, becoming the main driver of economic development (and often of urban and landscape devastation), leaving a heavy legacy for the territories.
We are globally faced with a confused tourism, developed without organisation, management or planning.
The film came into being in this context, with the desire to investigate an extremely fragile coastal space (the beach) now that tourism, in some territories, is sold as the only possible way.