Genre: Video / photographic installation
Direted by: Fabio Caramaschi and Silvia Caracciolo
Year: 2016
We started looking for a family history on the trail of Italian miners and we found them in the Belgian province of Hainaut in Wallonia.
In their eyes it seemed to us to see the looks of those young people who abandoned their land devastated by poverty and war, to seek a better future at the bottom of a black hole in a foreign country.
The film has a circular structure in which sound fragments emerge from the images as the memories re-emerge in the memory of the miners. These brave men, who have spent their lives fighting in the depths of the earth have allowed us to dig into their memories to entrust us with images and words that appear today as precious sound and visual repertoire from the last period of the coal age, a message from last inhabitants of an era just past, but already very far.
The six interviews, which are individually enjoyable through two monitor stations with headphones, offer the viewer a free ticket to travel with Italian miners from the villages lost from Sicily to Trentino from where they left to the one thousand meters deep tunnels where they have earned bread and dignity in a foreign land. In their testimonies our protagonists tells their feeling again, after 50 and more years, irreducibly Italians.