The Piedmont Speleological Group had already explored all the caves in Northern Italy by August 1961, so they decided to change course and head south. With an old man sitting at the entrance of the cave waiting for better days to come, the group gradually discovered the third deepest cave system in the world in Calabria, in south-eastern Italy. The film is not about how they got there, but how we got here.

Visual artist Michelangelo Frammartino doesn’t make films often – his previous film from 2010, The Four Times, was about the final days of a shepherd’s life and became an arthouse hit. This film too, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, has caught the attention of audiences. The film takes us into a chronological ornament of patterns, perspectives, observations, and the director’s own God’s eye. Frammartino has said that the moving image is always about a region, either the one you come from or a particular space in time.