Nostos : Il Ritorno

For Piavoli's hero, this enchantment is above all an enchantment with nature. For millennia, interpreters have found diverse ways to read The Odyssey. Franco Piavoli's version of the Homeric epic, his first fiction feature, translates its poetry through purely cinematic terms. The film's episodes freely remix elements of the poem, its characters and events recalling rather than directly adapting the text, evoking the jumbled memory of its wandering hero. The language of the film, invented using a mixture of Greek and ancient Mediterranean dialects, becomes a symbol of this ancestral wandering.

Piavoli aimed to create symphonic cinema, to express this timeless tale through vivid sensory experiences, the wine-dark sea, the terror of nature, the dread of war trauma and, above all else, the stubborn ache of homesickness. He conveys the myth in deeply human terms, without losing any of its sense of wonder.