Giulio Base’s film tells a timeless, universal story that intertwines with modern-day themes of immigration and integration. Giuseppe (Ivano Marescotti) manages a bar and a gas station, an isolated no-place where various types of humanity mingle in a free-zone and conflicts flare and subside, curiously located on the Apulia-Basilicata border.
Bitonto (BA) is the Christmas-nativity village where the characters spend their time. Seen several times by a fountain in via Raffaele Abbaticchio near piazza Carmine Sylos, Bikira (Virginia Diop) is a modern-day Samaritan in front of the living water. Her path crosses that of Giuseppe whose refuge is a cave-home in the Regional Nature Reserve of Lama Belice. Bucking all social convention, the pair marry in Palazzo Sylos Calò. A good soul, the man is the embodiment of the father archetype: his son Nicola is a baker in piazza Minerva. When a desperate Giuseppe doesn’t want to go home, he takes shelter from the rain under the bridge of Santa Teresa where he is surprised to come across his other son, “golden boy” Luigi. Conflicts subside as if blown away by the wind and father and son spend the night in each other’s arms in a moment of rebirth.
Giulio Base’s film tells a timeless, universal story that intertwines with modern-day themes of immigration and integration. Giuseppe (Ivano Marescotti) manages a bar and a gas station, an isolated no-place where various types of humanity mingle in a free-zone and conflicts flare and subside, curiously located on the Apulia-Basilicata border.
Bitonto (BA) is the Christmas-nativity village where the characters spend their time. Seen several times by a fountain in via Raffaele Abbaticchio near piazza Carmine Sylos, Bikira (Virginia Diop) is a modern-day Samaritan in front of the living water. Her path crosses that of Giuseppe whose refuge is a cave-home in the Regional Nature Reserve of Lama Belice. Bucking all social convention, the pair marry in Palazzo Sylos Calò. A good soul, the man is the embodiment of the father archetype: his son Nicola is a baker in piazza Minerva. When a desperate Giuseppe doesn’t want to go home, he takes shelter from the rain under the bridge of Santa Teresa where he is surprised to come across his other son, “golden boy” Luigi. Conflicts subside as if blown away by the wind and father and son spend the night in each other’s arms in a moment of rebirth.
A widower with two adult children, Giuseppe hires Bikira, a recent arrival from Africa, as a waitress for his gas station bar in the countryside. They fall in love, sparking huge scandal in the village, and later marry, despite the disapproval of his children.
