Davide Minotti

“Words are the only instruments I have”, says Aslı Erdoğan in this powerful audiovisual collage. The writer, physicist and human rights activist who lives in exile in Berlin writes against the disappearance and loss of her own language. As a former political prisoner in Turkey, she knows only too well what autocratic violence and oppression intend: to silence people.

Northern Italy, mid-1960s. Carla is a novice architect and is called to supervise the construction sites of a series of public works in the countryside. Carla meets with a team of construction engineers, tasked with making structural measurements. Locked in the laboratory they reproduce scale models of buildings and landscapes. Their dedication is alienating, as they reproduce life in scale like aliens from another dimension. The more time passes, the less motivated Carla is to work with them. For her, building means being among people, in the world. She dreams of knocking down walls, rather than raising them, and seeing the sky. Instead the engineers are locked in the laboratory, where there is no sky and the sun cannot shine.

The documentary shows the public and private aspects of Franco Buffoni's life: not only one of the nowadays greatest poets in Italy, but an important civil-rights activist, intellectually engaged in the analysis of the present.

“Words are the only instruments I have”, says Aslı Erdoğan in this powerful audiovisual collage. The writer, physicist and human rights activist who lives in exile in Berlin writes against the disappearance and loss of her own language. As a former political prisoner in Turkey, she knows only too well what autocratic violence and oppression intend: to silence people.

Northern Italy, mid-1960s. Carla is a novice architect and is called to supervise the construction sites of a series of public works in the countryside. Carla meets with a team of construction engineers, tasked with making structural measurements. Locked in the laboratory they reproduce scale models of buildings and landscapes. Their dedication is alienating, as they reproduce life in scale like aliens from another dimension. The more time passes, the less motivated Carla is to work with them. For her, building means being among people, in the world. She dreams of knocking down walls, rather than raising them, and seeing the sky. Instead the engineers are locked in the laboratory, where there is no sky and the sun cannot shine.

The documentary shows the public and private aspects of Franco Buffoni's life: not only one of the nowadays greatest poets in Italy, but an important civil-rights activist, intellectually engaged in the analysis of the present.