Between coming and going time feels leaden – a half-life in the light and dark contrasts of a linocut. The narrating voice’s mother cares for seniors in their homes for five euros an hour. At their bedsides the ticking clock counts down the working day, caught between the frightening sounds of the heavy breathing that comes with impending death and the roar of promises made by television. The dying are mother’s livelihood.

Enza, in her early twenties, is a singer and seeker studying the rhythms of life in Salento. She breathes music, collects old folksongs and thus connects the people, the present and the past. Rooted in Tarantism and in the tradition of the healers she uses singing as a means to fight alienation. Her portrait is a cinematic legacy vibrating with intensity. It reveals the thin line walked by those who refuse to be satisfied with relative freedom.

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.

In search of the cat Leo a boy roams through sunny fields. Drifting without a care and digging up treasures in the mysterious darkness of the barn are the last throes of childhood before it ends. The crayon colours of this summer are overlaid with the whispering and rustling of shelter – and a premonition. Mara Cerri and Magda Guidi sharpen our senses for the impressions of a confusing age.