Synopsis

Loves and deaths, children and escapes, divorces and betrayals. We Were All Alive recounts the lives of seven friends between 1993 and 2013, during the twenty years in which everything in Italy and the world changed: mass movements became ephemeral, globalization touched and wounded, neoliberalism showed its inhuman face. Against the backdrop of a city, Padua, transformed through the events of social centers, political changes, and the clashes over immigrants on Via Anelli, the characters' lives flow, intersect, and drift apart. When they meet again at Max's funeral, they will be forced to look back and ask themselves: "What have we done with our lives? Our hopes? Our desires?" With great narrative skill and a nimble, precise language, Claudia Grendene, making her debut here, paints a portrait of an almost invisible generation, moving from dreams of revolution to uncertainty, from university studies to precarious employment, from the desire for freedom to frustration. A painful and true novel, inhabited by people we recognize ourselves in.