In 1835 a French writer attempts the ascent of Mount Etna with a group of men, two mules, and a bottle of rum. Crossing the three areas of the volcano – the lower region, the fire region, and the desert region – they discover the enigmatic traces of unknown myths. New powerful eyes question the volcano, observe its every movement, and yearn to penetrate its secrets, and are faced with the most remote layers of matter and the depths of the technological gaze.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES:
Etna is an area of metamorphosis whose power stratifies everything. It is a place loaded with millenary literature and mythical imagery that keep existing in incessantly different forms. Etna is a great organism in which matter goes through matter; it prevents the absolutization and affirmation of any kind of identity. The volcano creates and erases.
In order to support the load of scientific documentation and imagery (of which the volcano itself is the revealer and protector), we decided to follow two guidelines. Both coexist in the film, crossing and cancelling each other out. On one hand, a physical experience: the ascent to volcano, the attempt of a hard journey on foot, along its skin, its surface, up to the high peak where the great summit craters are located. On the other, a journey that attempts to penetrate the secrets of matter itself, sinking inside its body, questioning the volcano through science and technological gaze, within the invisible and outside the human eye.
We find ourselves in front of enigmatic spaces. Everything connects with archetypal, mythological and superhuman forces, through contemporary and ancient symbolic relationships. One remains visually glued to the volcanoes matter. The sound design itself mixes direct takes and voice-over with frequencies elaborations generated by seismograms and vibrations of basaltic rocks.
The literature about Etna is endless; many travelers have faced the volcano, and just as many scientists have tried to question it over the centuries. Writers and scientists have often crossed their experiences. Starting from young Alexandre Dumas (father)’s travel diary, we mentioned Ovid, Lazzaro Spallanzani, the Appendix Vergiliana, Colombano di Bobbio, Carlo Gemmellaro, Haroun Tazieff, Chris Marker, and Cesare Pavese, whose excerpt from the Dialogues with Leucò gives the film its title.
"Where do the old gods that the world ignores go?" We never see the group of men climbing the summit craters, nor do we see the old scientist. We never see the entire body of the volcano, and the everlasting question of the title will not be answered.