Starting from the distance that separates him from asteroid 121019 Minodamato, the narrator embarks on an emotional journey in search of the many lives of his grandfather, Mino Damato: from reporting on some of the most devastating conflicts of the postwar era to the bright lights of 1980s television, and finally to his encounter with an HIV-positive orphan who would change his life forever. As fragments of family, personal and collective memory are pieced together, Mino’s boundless fascination with the cosmos emerges as the thread connecting a life that seems impossible to decipher.

Director’s notes

I built the film around the idea of a space to be put in order: the space between me and asteroid 121019 Minodamato. I let myself be guided by the voices of those who shared a part of my grandfather’s many lives: war correspondent, television host, and a man committed to the fight against HIV. Then came the archives, from NASA’s vast collection to the Super 8 footage that survived the Afghan front, from the RAI archives, twenty extraordinary years of public broadcasting, to our family films. Through these materials, I sought to bring collective and family memory into dialogue. From the outset, I wondered how three such different lives within the same man could speak to one another, and how I could find a thread capable of making them universal. The answer lay in the universe itself, in Mino’s passion for astronomy and in that pull towards the infinite that ran through his entire life.