A long night in a psychiatric hospital, in 1962. A forced pact between a nurse and a patient, in which the latter is subjected to inhumane practices.
The Human Hourglass is a minimalistic portrayal of suspended time, shared loneliness, and the possibility of surviving alienation through a small revolution: caring for others.

DIRECTOR' NOTES:
It's difficult for me to explain how this topic found its way into my thoughts and compelled me to tell this story. I should start by saying that I grew up in a small, provincial setting, with a mother and a grandmother who worked in a rehabilitation community for people with mental disabilities. It was within that environment that, as a child, I came into contact with many elderly individuals who had spent their entire lives in asylums and who, back in the 1990s, were living in completely different conditions—or at least, that's how my childhood eyes remember it. For the first time, they had the opportunity to live within a social context. Accustomed to being excluded from civil society, they were finally able to take part in it actively. I remember them as happy, kind, and above all, serene.
I don’t believe this was the case for all former psychiatric patients across Italy, and I don’t think it’s true for everyone even today. I also believe that mentally ill individuals who are dangerous to themselves or others do exist, and that they should not be left alone.
Ugo, the protagonist of this story, is one of those elderly people I met as a child. I pieced together his story by speaking with all the people who had been close to him and knew about his past as a psychiatric patient. I only have one vivid memory of him: an old man hunched over, elbows pressed to his chest and fists under his chin, mimicking a straitjacket, who suddenly raised his head and smilingly said to an attendant, "Puffetè, can you give me a little cigarette?"
The Human Hourglass is an excerpt, a part of a broader feature film project entitled Ugo, which tells the story of fifty years in the life of a psychiatric patient forced to pass through all the major Italian mental health institutions over time.
Specifically, the story of The Human Hourglass takes place before the introduction of Law 180 in 1978 (commonly known as the "Basaglia Law") and recounts a procedure actually used by night nurses in psychiatric hospitals in the early 1960s, as told by Franco Basaglia himself in The Institution Denied.
Ugo, the protagonist, is forced to endure a veiled form of torture imposed by a nurse. It’s an unequal exchange—a do ut des—in which the patient is required to stay awake all night in exchange for the only currency that mattered within those walls: tobacco. Each night, Ugo carefully separates the tobacco from crumbs of bread, a task that takes exactly thirty minutes. At the end of the process, he wakes the nurse, who has been resting instead of doing his job. This is necessary because the nurse’s timecard must be stamped every thirty minutes to prove his presence and vigilance. In return, the patient receives the tobacco he himself had sorted—his only reward, if we can call it that. Ugo, then, becomes a human hourglass.
But what happens when an instrument of torture like this crosses paths with the childlike innocence of a pure soul like Ugo’s? What happens is that the torture takes on a less macabre and more human meaning—it becomes a game, and therefore, a form of love. Ugo's mind and eyes can only perceive the good in this world—in this case, lots of cigarettes to give to his fellow patients, making them happy, if only for the length of a smoke.
After all, it’s easy to be happy when there’s no reason to be.