For thousands of years, hard-working peasants have walked the wheat-covered hills of Lucania, a region in southern Italy, with their unrelenting stride. Traditional labourers and contemporary farmers live side by side, renewing their archaic care for the land, the harvest and the animals, during the eternal passing of the seasons. Their efforts are elevated by Guastamacchia, a singing farmer who wanders the landscape seeking work in the service of his masters. The voice of Guastamacchia evokes the tales of survival of a rural community marked by decades of struggles told by some glorious piece of militant literature.
The preferred vehicle for the spoken word is song, the universal language of the peasants, who have passed down their stories, solely through oral tradition. The musical flow carries the poems by Rocco Scotellaro, extraordinary voice for peasant freedom, militant upon the land and the writing. Amidst the remnants of twentieth-century rural civilisation, littered with the ruins of a failed Agrarian Reform, the peasants attempt to pass on ancestral practices to a future that remains undefined.