Paternicillina: Story of a Forgotten Director (2020)

Paternicillina is the last movie by Adolfo Baruffi It should have been his first fictional work but it will never see the light. Baruffi, Florestano Vancini's master, is seen as a promising talent of reality cinema by his contemporaries, he produced more than twenty films between the end of '40s and the mid- 50s. Then nothing more. Silence. An escape? A renunciation of a dream? This documentary doesn't just try to go over the life of a film director who wanted to be forgotten, but it reveals the core of the cinematographic vocation. A trip to hell where present and past overlap and lets us understand that failure is the essential test for any artist. It is the story of a man with three lives, poet and shoe agent, film director and man among men, " the former is always among the losers" with a rare smile. "Would you do all you did?" "No, I wouldn't, just a stroke of madness."