Matteo Tortone

A woman travels from southern China to Turin, Italy, to see her husband. But an unexpected departure leaves her to find herself again, and to find cinema.

Jorge leaves his home and family in the outskirts of Lima to try his luck in the goldmines of the Andes, chasing the promises of the mother lode. We follow Jorge through a journey full of omens, where reality and magical thinking blend together, as he discovers that the myth of wealth is built on sacrifices that become ever more tangible – while the boundaries between victims and oppressors get progressively vague and blurred. Mother Lode is a fable about the banality of the descent to hell in times of neoliberalism; it is a paradigm of a relentless world in which everything can be sacrificed in the name of profit.

Sunday night. Alex is an ultras, his team has just lost a match and he is going home empty-headed. In the absence of his parents, he lives with his grandmother and sells Rivotril tablets to make some money. On a night that’s struggling to take off, Alex goes down to the basement and into a cellar where a bunch of people are gathered. A rap battle is in progress. Nemy is a girl with refined bars, who dances confidently and sinuously. She notices Alex and seeks him out. Together they venture into the night, driving in a stolen car. Two solitudes that recognise each other. Their bodies brush against each other in what seems to be the beginning of a story.

Within a week, the lives of three teenagers intertwine around the burning of a Roma camp. Alessandra is raped, Thomas is accused and Alex has to choose between the truth and bigger interests at play.

Emilia and Caterina write letters to each other, revisiting their adolescent memories and earliest experiences at a boarding school in the 1950s. ​Did they choose the lives they truly wanted, or only those they dared to imagine?