Alessandro Rota

For eight years, Ferdinando has stopped speaking with people. In the solitude of his Milan apartment, he cooks, practices singing, and does an improbable form of gymnastics. He is paid to keep company to Genziana, a wealthy and cultured lady, who needs to connect with a deep soul akin to her own. Ferdinando reads her passages of literature. She narrates the happy fragments of her life, now vanished: she is a widow, her children are far away, the house is empty and silent. In his free time, Ferdinando visits modernist architecture and spiritual places. His isolation is interrupted by calls from Domenico, an eccentric who rambles about lofty subjects, aware that he cannot break his friend's mutism.

A young girl is getting ready to welcome a client at her apartment.The man, transposition of Don Quixote, following a precise ritual, devotes himself to the maniacal cleaning of four rooms. The girl, personification of Dulcinea, eats, reads, paints her nails and smokes. She dress up and she get undress as if Don Quixote is not present there and as if there is no relationship between them. The client, following a pathological scheme, steals some girl’s objects, he puts them in a plastic bag and than inside a small briefcase. Sometimes the objects he fetishizes are destroyed like victims of maniacal bursts. This mechanism leads to the repetition of a celibate and solitary rite.

Turin, 1909. Cesare Lombroso arrives at the isolated mansion of Lazar, an elderly illusionist. Lombroso, attracted to Spiritualism, challenges Lazar: to prove that the supernatural exists and that it may be the cause of a heinous crime.

For eight years, Ferdinando has stopped speaking with people. In the solitude of his Milan apartment, he cooks, practices singing, and does an improbable form of gymnastics. He is paid to keep company to Genziana, a wealthy and cultured lady, who needs to connect with a deep soul akin to her own. Ferdinando reads her passages of literature. She narrates the happy fragments of her life, now vanished: she is a widow, her children are far away, the house is empty and silent. In his free time, Ferdinando visits modernist architecture and spiritual places. His isolation is interrupted by calls from Domenico, an eccentric who rambles about lofty subjects, aware that he cannot break his friend's mutism.

A young girl is getting ready to welcome a client at her apartment.The man, transposition of Don Quixote, following a precise ritual, devotes himself to the maniacal cleaning of four rooms. The girl, personification of Dulcinea, eats, reads, paints her nails and smokes. She dress up and she get undress as if Don Quixote is not present there and as if there is no relationship between them. The client, following a pathological scheme, steals some girl’s objects, he puts them in a plastic bag and than inside a small briefcase. Sometimes the objects he fetishizes are destroyed like victims of maniacal bursts. This mechanism leads to the repetition of a celibate and solitary rite.

Turin, 1909. Cesare Lombroso arrives at the isolated mansion of Lazar, an elderly illusionist. Lombroso, attracted to Spiritualism, challenges Lazar: to prove that the supernatural exists and that it may be the cause of a heinous crime.

Turin, 1909. Cesare Lombroso arrives at the isolated mansion of Lazar, an elderly illusionist. Lombroso, attracted to Spiritualism, challenges Lazar: to prove that the supernatural exists and that it may be the cause of a heinous crime.