Streams and currents in the Apennines

The documentary tells stories of landscapes, men and water. The Reggian Apennine, with its rivers, streams, lakes, waterfalls, its innumerable springs, its mountains full of history, represents the ideal place to tell about water, or better to make water speak of itself. Water as metaphor of the fluid link between past and future. That same lively water which, with her incessant flowing, shapes the landscape, unites distant communities and carries stories and memories downstream. Exploring the mountains that surround the Secchia Valley we run into narrations where the destinies of water and men intersect: a solitary dam keeper, always watching over a load of tons of water, in the dreamy suggestions of the surrounding landscape; the women from Casalino, who in 1928 rose up to the Fascist militia to ask for the building of fountains and to affirm their right to water; the collective management of Consorzio Ventasso which independently runs the water resources of the area, providing the villages with pure water channeled in rural acqueducts; the visit of school children to the River Secchia sources, in a strange journey in between a school trip and an initiation path towards ancestral origins; and again other children learning to wash clothes with ashes, in the old way.  In the whole film water flows and renews itself: an element of memory passing on through generations.