A film commissioned for a school education programme. The goal of this programme is to teach children about their own history and that of their country – especially on the background of the recent wars. The hope is that this knowledge will also be applied to the future, that it will bring colour to the black and white, a smile to the gloom.

Since 1999, the Far East Film Festival, the biggest festival of popular Asian films in Europe, has been held annually in the Italian city of Udine. Špela Čadež was commissioned to design the trailer for its 11th edition in 2009 and delivered a crisp and short, wonderfully incisive puppet animation about the love of noodles – with or without cheese – that unites cultures and continent.

Hunger and hardship ruled the Piemontese mountain village of Ughettera at the beginning of the 20th century. The meek peasants complained neither about the parasitic priests nor the tough seasonal winter work in neighbouring France – not even when the Italian state called them to arms and sent them first to Libya, then into the World War. Only when the Fascists arrive did the Ughetto family trade its home for new deprivations and new hopes across the border.

With this imaginatively directed puppet animation, Alain Ughetto has created a warm-hearted memorial to his Italian grandparents Cesira and Luigi. With subtle humour, tenderness and empathy he tells of generations who lived in poverty, but also of happiness and love, fortunes and misfortunes. “You don’t come from a country, you come from your childhood”, Cesira teaches him. The director finds himself in this family chronicle, recognises his predilection for working with his hands. Soon the film becomes a reflection on telling stories with what these hands shaped. They are frequently present in the frame – piling charcoal into a mountain, making forests from broccoli or simply getting handed a cup of damn strong espresso by Cesira.

Shaking his head, Michele looks at the olives lying on the ground. Nobody collects them now. He once planted the olive trees. They were his pride and fed the family. Now he sits by the fireplace with his wife. Their hands show the years of hard field work. With a tender gaze, their grandson watches his grandparents cook, argue, take walks. Moving snapshots that coalesce into a life lived, a chronicle of the rural exodus in Italy.