Stefano is a social worker who creates integrated theatre with people with disabilities, including psychiatric ones. Often, continuing is hard. So what do you do—stop? No. You just go backwards.
Rehearsals with “actors” Elisabetta, Luigi, Alessandra, and Daniele alternate with workshops where Barbara, Cinzia, Daniele, Mario, Marco, Rosaria, and Benedetta explore deep inner worlds through theatre practice—bringing their ideas, memories, autism, syndromes, imagination, anxiety, joy, memory, and psychosis into a whirlwind of art and disability. They move backwards toward new progress, guided by Stefano, who absorbs everything, encourages them, leads and engages them—ultimately revealing himself to be far less invulnerable than he might have first appeared…
Full speed backward! is a story of marginalisation, of physical and mental outskirts, of dark places both outside and within. But it is also a story of creativity, resilience, and the will to live.

Director's note

Full speed backward! is an intimate observation of a hidden world—the world of disability and mental distress—often talked about and portrayed, yet rarely truly known in its daily reality.
Stefano, who lives this world every day, set out not to stage yet another experience of integrated Theatre with a capital “T”: he’s not a director, and the participants are not actors; there are no auditions to pass, and no choosing between one participant and another, since they themselves don’t choose but are assigned through the social service network.
What Stefano wants to create is a theatre where the “t” is lowercase, because what becomes uppercase is the process—the journey of preparation and the way the show is built. This leads to the paradox that the real performance is the rehearsal itself, and that opening night becomes just another rehearsal—perhaps the first one from which a new preparation begins. In the Theatre of Going Backwards, you don’t move forward in a straight line.