Every day, every week, every month, every year, a gentleman goes out with his sausage dog, continuously tracking the same path: from home, he arrives in Piazza Garibaldi and then returns. It records every footstep with the shy curiosity of narrating a calm, inert, and almost dull daily life.
The challenge is to film for a minute each time, telling of the symmetries, voids, light plays, and the boredom.
But one day, he happens to discover that from there, a few months away, the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, will come to visit and will cross that very Square.

Director’s notes

Over the last ten years, I have intensified my work as a teacher of film language and film literacy in schools of all levels. My constant work with students has led me to rethink the way I do cinema through a path of research around discovering an expressive medium that was as essential as possible.
In constantly questioning the relevance of the language of cinema, I worked out a poetic that soon covered the meaning of my being in the world: the profound significance of living within a community and changing it through one’s own eyes.
The film’s gimmick enabled me to turn Piazza Garibaldi into my Theatre 5, Andrea and the Lord of the Pigeons into the new Mastroianni and Charlie Chaplin on a script written by Cesare Zavattini. Cinema has allowed me to ask myself what is genuinely extraordinary and guess why it could be in everyone’s sight without anyone being aware of it.
I am increasingly convinced that we need to bring the extraordinary back into our midst and to do so, we need to rebuild a new pact between the public and the film product.
In order not to break that pact, “W il Presidente!” will only be visible inside cinemas and will never be released for home viewing on streaming platforms.