November 2024: Francesco De Gregori chooses a small Milan theatre, the Out-Off, to embark on a residency of twenty concerts over the course of a month. Each evening, he will perform a set list selected from around seventy songs he considers his lesser-known works to an audience of around 200. The programme features many friends selected from among the greatest talents in Italian music, each invited to share his stage for a concert: Jovanotti, Zucchero, Ligabue, Malika Ayane, Elisa. Nevergreen chronicles this unique experience, filmed up close, including during rehearsals, in the dressing rooms, and by spying on the encounters between these giants of Italian music. It’s set against the backdrop of a Milan that warmly welcomes the great singer-songwriter from Rome, finally putting on the map many little-known masterpieces from his splendid songbook.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES:
Nevergreen is Francesco’s third outing. The first was Finestre rotte (2013), a road movie that depicted De Gregori as a “grown-up”, as he was turning 60. In 2022, De Gregori & Venditti: Falegnami & Filosofi captured his stage reunion with Antonello Venditti, his lifelong friend.
This time, Francesco raised the bar: like many musicians, he insisted that only the music do the talking, a repertoire of his lesser-known pieces, performed for a month in a small Milan theatre. But the songs alone struggle to stand out on screen: the challenge, then, was to revisit an intimate De Gregori within the confines of the “music only” dictum. We operated by osmosis, and we’re convinced that it was a success.