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(Salina, Italy)
Duration: 30 minutes
Year of Production: 2005
Distribution: RAIEDUCATIONAL
Format: Dvcam
Director: Claudio Conti
Director of Photography: Mauro Marchetti
Editing: Gaia Borretti
Script: Michela Morano
Production Director: Michela Morano
They say that Salina was in way "saved" by wine and by capers. That the island has always looked more to the land than to the sea is easy to intuit: it is enough to turn your gaze to the two cone-shaped slopes of the two volcanoes of Salina: the traces of the ancient terraces arrive at the summit, almost at the border of the two craters. Capers, beyond their economic value, are the identity of the island. For decades and decades the harvesting of the capers was a women's trade. They are faster!, say the men. The hands of the caper-harvesters are as quick as lighting: they seize a branch, pick the buds and they let them slide into a cloth sack hung from an apron. Amelia is the woman of record: 37 kilos of capers in one day. A good harvester succeeds in carrying home 20, 25 kilos every day. One works from five in the morning until eleven. Then the sun becomes unmerciful and it is time to take a breather under the shade of the reed verandas.
But today nobody wants to harvest capers anymore. The women prefer to go to work in hotels and restaurants. Meanwhile Moroccan or Albanian harvesters appear, and the competition with Spanish and North African capers is threatening.
All in all, globalization has not forgotten Salina and the caper bushes diminish. Producers prefer to buy from families with farms/gardens rather than plant new rows.
The documentary retraces the social history of the caper and of the malvasia grape (used to make malmsey wine) in order to underline the real character of the cultural identity of Salina. A "slow" history for an Island that in the last years has become first in line in a project based on a new idea of tourism. The key words are: de-seasonalization and development of the present biodiversity.
Among the voices that give life to this story, Adrian Wolfgang Martin, Swiss writer and poet, author of many volumes of poetry, of non-fiction and of novels, including "Salina", entirely set on the island. Adrian discovered Salina in the 1950's, bought a house where he spent six months of the year and was selected to be an honorary citizen of Salina because he instituted the Fondazione Salina (Salina Foundation) for the development of Aeolian culture.
Supporting the documentary will be the story of the vicissitudes, the adventures and the anecdotes of Francesco Fenech, owner of the oldest winery on the island, and the story of Carlo Hauner, designer and painter who at the beginning of the 1970's established himself on the island, and his company has been dedicated solely to the cultivation of malvasia for forty years. A peculiarity is that all the labels of the Hauner wines are made from canvas painted on Salina.
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