Milan, Italy, 1967. Santo Russo, a boy of Calabrian origin, arrives north with his parents and younger brother to find better living conditions. Due to an absurd misunderstanding and his father's contempt, Santo ends up in prison, where he gets a “true education.” In 1978, he and his friends Slim and Mario embark on a 15-year criminal career, a successful and ruthless spiral of robberies, kidnappings, murders and heroin smuggling.
Rosa is a young rebel girl who lives with her grandmother and her uncle in a remote part of Calabria, in Southernmost Italy. Her mother's untimely death when Rosa was a child casts a gloomy shadow on her present life.
A former narcotics smuggler, now living peaceably in the Calabrian hills, is drawn back into his family’s drug-trade dynasty by his impetuous teenage son.
An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes to find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.
Daniel Kemény returns twenty years later to the place of his childhood, the village of Pietrapaola in Calabria. In search of lost time, the filmmaker collects musical accounts, brings together their protagonists and gives these memories a new life, thus playing the generous transmitter who helps keep alive the oral history of a world whose popular traditions are dying off.
Antonio Cotroneo, a man in his fifties; in his Calabrian hometown everybody calls him Totó. For many decades he has been living in his chosen exile. Having subsequently married an Austrian woman and fathered four sons, the graduate political scientist earns his money as an usher at Vienna Konzerthaus.
The millennia-old myth and tradition of St. Lucy's fire told through the eyes of teenagers on the shores of the Ionian Sea.
Relaxing by the sea, a couple discusses the true meaning of dreams. The spiritually minded of the two argues that dreams are more real than reality itself, her partner argues the opposite. When they bet on it, things start to get haywire.
The powers of love are always at work. But when they do so in an ancient southern Italian town at sunset, they seem just a little more magical.
There are many funny ways to park a car. This is number eleven.
Mali - Algeria - Libya - Italy. Issa’s escape from West Africa to the European mainland lasted ten years. Everything was supposed to be better here. But when he arrived in Rome, the only thing waiting for the young man was a life of homelessness and unemployment – which meant no money to send home. Drissa and Sekou share a similar fate, waiting in Italian asylum centres for a residence permit. Then there’s Bubu, who, forced to move from job to job, is unable to settle down. And lastly comes Alassane, who lives without identity papers in a state of constant uncertainty in a refugee camp near Rome. They all have one thing in common: after a gruelling odyssey, none of them has found the Italy they were hoping for when they arrived. Disillusioned, they find themselves in a vacuum of waiting, reflecting on the time they live in and the time that lies ahead.