During the first huge pandemic of this millennium, Gianfranco, a man in his fifties forced in his house, while rearranging old memories, finds a video8 cassette with images that date back to the start of February 1990. In the cassette, filmed in Berlin while the wall was being demolished, him and Andrea, a peer and classmate of his at the Csc, try some scenes from “wings of desire” and walk along the rests of the wall, built in 1962 by the Ddr, with their friends Diletta and Sabina.
Gianfranco reflects: what was 1989? Which hopes did it bring? And what happened in our society and lives during the following years, until our harsh days? Thus, he decides to look for Andrea, inviting him to a common reflection, an excuse to give a meaning to all that time that has now become available.
In the months and days that anticipated the pandemic millions of young people all over the world were protesting in the squares of their cities every Friday. The old representatives of the various parliaments and institutions were being silenced with the phrase “okay boomer”. With this “okay boomer” Greta Thunberg and the youth of Friday For Future wanted to show how the generation born from the economic boom (1948-1968) was the real responsible of the theft of the future that they were suffering. So, in the weeks of the pandemic and in the summer that follows, a dialogue develops between Gianfranco and Andrea, starting from the Berlin materials, with frequents incursions of the internet, looking for fragments of memory that will compose the mosaic of their existence in the last 30 years. The two of them start exchanging short and provocatory video-letters. And they also consult their daughters, still young, trying to find a red thread with Diletta, the girl, an aspiring actress, that in that far February of 1990 walked with them beside the remains of the Berlin Wall and that, symbolically, represents a youth now far away from the authors.
Gianfranco is of socialist formation and today he is a catholic of dissent. He believes in the possibility of a ransom for that part of humanity that was most humiliated and offended, also by cultivating a Christian hope that, unfortunately, always has to face men’s limits.
Andrea, a transversalist – situationist, anticapitalist militant, who believes in the pope and the church, but not in God, who he considers a philosophic paradox.
Their points of view, joined by a Marxist formation during their youth, find themselves in antithesis with everything that concerns present and future. But these contrasts are what compose a complex and plural view of humanity. Contrasts that sometimes create even paradoxical and humorous situations.