"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
Thomas Stearn Eliot
CHILDREN OF THE RIVER
A film by federico Rodelli
SYNOPSIS
On the Po River between Parma and Cremona, Italy, there are lonely microcosmos where water, sky and hearth seem to be one thing and the delicate balance between dreamed and reality can be confused. Here, three men wandering as restless souls, unable to find their own place in the world, have supernatural experiences along the banks of the Po. For them, this mysterious river transcends its material physicality to become a spiritual place, an ancient refuge, a sacred space, a guardian of an ancestral and otherworldly serenity to which these children of the river entrust their dreams of happiness, to escape the loneliness of their life.
Reality or self-suggestions, behind the experiences lived by these people there seems to be the hope of finding a sort of redemption, a lost serenity lost or, maybe, never known. Indeed, the story’s core is a thought about loneliness, told through the emotional tensions of men whose restlessness pushes them to cross the great embankment that separates the river from the rest of the world, entering along a river made by magical water, where they can see the reflection of their faces and speak to their most intimate self and to reach it they must be willing to immerse themselves in their own deep waters.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
The idea of this film comes from the kaleidoscopic suggestions that the Po, that is an atavistic element of these lands, has always aroused in me. Places of my childhood, soaked in a kind of water that is a significant element of the story and from which everything begins. Water that transcends its own matter to become a spiritual element. Magical water, source of light, revelation, epiphany. Viaticum towards deeper truths, preserved beyond the density of matter. “After all - writes Gaston Bachelard - what other element, better than water, can be a source of reveries (fantasies)”.
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More than as a real place, I have always preferred to look at the Po River as a metaphysical dimension in the heart of the Po Valley, Italy, soaked in the ancestral water of an ancient river on whose twisted banks, shaped by a nature that is wild and primitive, the reality can turn into supernatural.
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Right here, after long wanderings along the banks of the Po, I encountered some of his children. In the novel Journey at the beginning of the day, the writer Alberto Bevilacqua, regarding certain places along the Po, writes "Over there, they have always lived in defiance of logic, witty and dazed, in a world, or underworld, where sometimes something is invents and sometimes is not, stealing from the reality the part of the improbable that it always contains, but that it remains the reality."