Red Mud (2020)

Fango Rosso (red mud), is the toxic waste of the mining extraction. It covers up the hills of Sulcis, a land where the astonishing beauty of the landscape collides with a history of betrayed promises, progress as a mirage, politics as deceit. Damiano and Mattia spend their afternoons in the shade of the mine ruins. They are a little past thirty, but the hair raised by the wind makes them look like teenagers. They climb on precarious walls, they hide on dark ravines, they light their torches looking for something we do not know. Free, as two adventurers of a sleepy land. At the end of the evening they sit and light a cigarette, before the night falls beyond the smoke-stacks by the sea shore. Red Mud is an intimate journey among the ruins of the industrial colonization, whence a desolate landscape and a new and extravagant beauty seem to emerge.