Eugenio Barzaghi

For centuries, every year on September 8 myriad swarms of winged ants have been arriving on the Mount of Ants. Similar to clouds obfuscating the sky, these small insects mate in a wonderful flight followed by the death of all the males, which fall exhausted onto the yard of the church rising on the mountain top, once called "Santa Maria Formicarum". The mating flight blazes out like an ecstatic apparition before the eyes of the curious, of tourists and the faithful, who arrive here every year to admire and to celebrate this feast dedicated to the "Virgin of the Mount of Ants". This singular event is the starting point for reflection within the film, which asks questions about the small insects’ nature and that of human beings. Great writers like Nobel Prize-winner Maurice Maeterlinck and entomologist Carlo Emery have studied them a lot: their words echo out again, nowadays, in the voices of witnesses in the film.

A soldier who died in World War I. A photographer who, over a hundred years later, finds his autographed diary and decides to follow its trail from Avellino in southern Italy to the hills of the Karst in the northeast. Both have the same name: Eugenio Barzaghi. The only possible point of their encounter is the “Bocca d'inferno” (Mouth of Hell): a trench with a frightening name where the soldier fought.