Recasting his newborn son and dog as himself and his childhood pets, a filmmaker confronts his own false memories through a collage of film, digital and video game footage.

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban reconquer Afghanistan after twenty years of Western military presence, establishing a religious dictatorship. The country falls into a chaos of violence, extreme poverty, human rights violations. The Taliban establish a gender apartheid that segregates women within their homes, prohibiting them from studying beyond the age of twelve, working, going to gyms, parks, beauty salons. In public, women are forbidden to show their faces, and even to make their voices heard.
For Afghan women, the only choice is between social death and fleeing abroad. Fatima, Madina, Mahdia, Krishma and Sonia managed to escape and today they are living in Italy as refugees. In the documentary movie Faghan* they talk about their lives as young women, active and full of projects, before the Taliban returned to power. They recall their desperate escape, during the turbulent days in August 2021 when they watched their dreams crumble, forced to abandon a land that, despite everything, they continue to love with intense nostalgia. Punctuated by exclusive footage of the capture of Kabul, and others filmed today into clandestine girls’ schools, these testimonies wish to speak on behalf of all Afghan women. Offering a deep and universal reflection on the condition of all refugees. * In Dari language, “faghan” is a moan, a cry of pain. From a verse of Daughter of Afghanistan by the poet Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005), beaten to death by her husband who didn’t tolerate her independence as a woman and as a prominent intellectual.

The film is an exploration of the Italian landscape; the theme is the surrealist nature of this territory, the most dreamlike and often least known side of it. It is a selection of about ninety destinations, from north to south, from east to west, including the major islands and some of the minor ones; places telling a truth about the exotic character of one’s own country, setting of great topological naturalistic and chthonic events, a Dantesque empire!: the journey proceeds vertically, from the shady areas of the subsoil up to the aerial views of the mountainous vaults and the revelations of high altitude.