Synopsis

Tommaso Prina, the young man who rose from nothing to become the owner of the largest mill in the Savigliano plain, loses a receipt during the war. It is the price of a forced flour levy imposed by the fascist authorities during the strikes of March 1943, an amount never paid. Against the backdrop of his frantic search for what he has lost and the reclamation of a denied right, the entire twentieth century unfolds, stormy and tragic, seen through the eyes of a man progressively losing touch with the evolution of society, customs, and the most intense events of his own family, dominated as he is by a single, obsessive "question of principle." This question will ironically resolve itself, but by exacting the highest price, making him, despite himself, a symbol of the human condition. Set in the Savigliano plain, the story, with a light yet engaging hand, composes the story of a family and the fresco of a corner of the Italian province with its dramas, its loves, its moral tensions and its unconscious search for a barrier to the disorientation of the world.