Logline

A journey into the deep South of the United States of America, meeting people, stories and places marked by the history of the Country. A reflection on the beginning and end of the great American dream.

Synopsis

In the summer of 2017, a young filmmaker drives through Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North and South Carolina. During the journey, he films the surrounding landscape as a metaphysical place, between uncontaminated and abandoned. A generous nature and semi-deserted towns. The sound of summer cicadas and those of banjos. But also the encounter with ordinary people whose stories intersect with the great History of the Country.

A house that has seen three hundred years of various generations of the same family pass by, from the conquest of Independence to the Civil War, from slavery to Abraham Lincoln. The encounter with the Amish community who live according to the religious and moral rules of the 16th century. And also the stories of those who have chosen to live far from the cities and at the rhythm of nature. There are those who survived Hurricane Katrina and see the inexorable change that the Louisiana coast is destined to. Multiracial America and opportunities, the America of racism. The America of guns and the Bible.

Many and different narrative voices that proceed accompanied by quotes from American literary authors, anecdotes and live recorded music.

A reflection on a Country still deeply marked by the heavy legacy left by colonialism, the civil war and racial segregation. The beginning and the end of the great dream, which was, perhaps, everyone’s dream.

Timeliness of the documentary

The video material was shot in 2017 in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s inauguration at the White House, who had just won the elections over rival Hillary Clinton, and who found a divided America. The writing and other research took years until the final editing finished in 2024, coinciding with Trump’s election to a second term.  Seven years later, that early divide seem to have increased and the imminent outcome of the polls is feared to escalate a climate of civil war tension. The logic and geopolitical balances of the world are closely linked to each other and American politics has always had repercussions on European politics. To understand the present, you need to know and be able to read the past.

Director’s notes

The journey, conceived in this very way, was the dream of a lifetime for me, an avid fan of certain American cinema and literature. Of its nature and its spaces. I was not just a traveler but also a spectator. A very conflicted one. I was not interested, or rather conditioned by the myth, but rather by the contradictions, the conflicts, that somehow always emerged within a country that had to deal with the circumstances in which it was born. On one side the hubris of the man as explorer, the consequent colonialism, the violence to consolidate domination, the genocide of the native peoples. On the other the hope born within the desperation of masses of immigrants chased away from Europe because they were constantly subordinated to the aristocracies, like the Irish oppressed by the English, or of persecuted religious beliefs that forced the Amish to flee. Up to those who had been forcibly taken away from Africa, to be made slaves of the newborn American aristocracies.

And then the wild nature, the constant wars between Indians and colonists, between colonists and colonists, between colonists and new immigrants. Then the epidemics that decimated first the natives and then the colonists, themselves carriers of many diseases. A nation made by immigrants. The patriotism of expatriates.

It is with this baggage that I set out on a journey entirely on the road, sleeping in motels and private homes. I recorded the sounds, the words, the frequent sudden encounters, the stories of ordinary people that intertwined with the great American History, going back to slavery and Abraham Lincoln and even further to the first pioneers. All these stories had a common denominator: the search for a place to settle and make one’s vision of a life in freedom real. Which in the end, is everyone’s dream.

30 hours of footage and thousands of kilometers traveled. I had collected such a quantity of material that it had to be managed with caution. I wanted those encounters with the places and the people who inhabited them to reflect the complexity of the country, a complexity fertilised at the exact moment the first explorer, jumping off a boat, had sunk his boot into the sand.

The editing lasted 7 years, between pauses, delays and reflections. Years in which I made other work trips to the American and Canadian continents, always accompanied by readings of socio-anthropological essays, novels and insights. Not to arrive at the answer, but at the question that is the motivation of the entire documentary: to what extent is the identity of a country marked by the conditions in which it was born? Because American history has always been a European, African, Eastern history, the history of all those who left in search of their Arcadia. And this did not seem so different to me from nowadays.