La balena di Rossellini looks at a film that the director of Rome, Open City never made, but for which he took copious notes while on a trip to Chile in May 1971, to make an interview-portrait of Salvador Allende.
Back from Santiago with Bondì – at the time his young student and later his assistant director – Rossellini read a newspaper account of a whale beached off the Pacific Coast, near a destitute fishing village. That simple article inspired a story on wealth and poverty.