Marco Steiner

The title 'The desire to be useless' recalls a famous Hugo Pratt's expression and contains a double meaning. On one hand, it representes the comic's claim as an art form, long considered marginal but elevated, but by Pratt was considered a language with high literary and artistic value. On the other, it expresses a life philosophy founded on freedom, on the rejection of reducing existence to fiction or to commodity, and on the possibility of the adventure and the unexpected. Containing interviews with Patrizia Zanotti, Dominique Petitfaux, Thierry Thomas e Marco Steiner, the documentary completes a cinematic research lasted twenty years, returning Hugo Pratt as one of the most important auhor of illustrated literature and an artist still capable of being received by the contemporary audience.

A promising Italian cartoonist lands in Buenos Aires in 1950, with the dream of reaching the United States, to discover that, for him, America will be Argentina. The country immediately overwhelms him with its massive economic boom and a cultural scene among the most vibrant in the world. We are at the dawn of Argentina's most delirious decade, and the young immigrant feels that the vast promise of this country is within his grasp. His name will indeed make itself known: Hugo Pratt.