Synopsis

A harsh valley. In its midst, the slow flow of the river. A man throws flat stones into the water. His son finds him absorbed, feverish, in that landscape. It was there that he began painting, to make each canvas a potential redemption, and he has returned there now that evil is consuming him. But the evil began long before, in the 1970s, when the painter father abandoned his valley and descended to the plains toward a strange city, into a cubicle-like room to sleep, into a department clouded by asbestos. Outside the factory gates, there is a fight over shifts, wages, and more humane rhythms, but no one is yet truly aware of how the worker's body is exposed to illness and death. There, the painter father began to die. His son has inherited a panic that keeps him confined to his home, and from the unprotected confines of that exile he peers back into the factory, his burning dreams, his sinking imagination, the subtly wounded body of those who called that hell "work." It takes an encounter with Cesare, a worker and union organizer, to overcome his fear and begin to retrace the story of his father, a painter, and of all the workers who died of lung cancer. It is then that the memory becomes relentless and searches for color, love, a new destiny.