L'umanità Scalza

After 15 years Rosa comes back to Calabria, to the village where she grew up. Her first best friend, Pepè, is a Down Syndrome guy who has waited her return for years. Now he is waiting for her at the harbor. Because of the inevitable meeting with Mico, Rosa remembers a painful episode of her adolescence, a journey never set out on and a child never born. Pepè is the only one to be with her, he would hold her and not let her go away anymore.

I wanted to describe a generation aged thirty-five, people who are no longer young and not still adult, who face their native land for the only reason that they live or lived there, who realise that they didn’t go their way completely, who meet again in the places of a wild restless Calabria, remaining fixed in an atavistic immobility, to talk about their modest stories and a journey never set out on, a journey to Berlin, where the Wall had already fallen down... At the age of sixteen many people among us wanted to reach Berlin, where it snows even in the summertime, we listened to Pink Floyd and we wanted to run away to the Wall which had fallen down, but nobody moved... Rosa didn’t move either, she really crossed only Messina’s Strait, remaining on the other part for twenty years. I started from this point, the aim is to create a film trying to describe a suspended time which does not forget any bond, an on the road that talks about a place which is difficult to represent: the place of the soul devoid of every artifice. Therefore, The Barefoot Humanity becomes a friendship story, the friendship between a woman and a down man: Rosa and Pepè; the story of a never-born child who, through Pepè’s eyes, becomes real as fables, the story of a return, and as every return everything seems unchanged, even feelings; but then it is clear that time inevitably breaks bonds and forces us to face our past, anyway. Finally, it’s Pepè’s story, the story of a man who becomes the witness of others’ life, a witness worth meeting sooner or later, in order to learn to look through different eyes. This film is dedicated to Pepè, who is no longer here, and I’d like to think that somewhere he continues to be the witness of our stories.
Americo Melchionda