La creazione di significato

In the opening scene of The Creation of Meaning, the camera glides over the Apuan Alps, engulfed in clouds. In the voice-over, children tell gruesome stories about World War II, when the German occupiers slaughtered hundreds of civilians as they retreated. It turns out to be a school class sitting in a circle under a tree in landscape from paradise.
Afterwards, the Canadian-Italian director focuses on shepherd Pacifico, a man in his 60s who is forced by the deplorable economic circumstances to sell his land to a friendly German who has become a naturalised Italian.
The boundaries between fiction, documentary, oral history and anthropology start to fade as past and present merge seamlessly. Images of this overwhelming landscape are juxtaposed with close-ups of butterflies, spiders, flowers, glimpses of everyday life and a three-minute amateur film in which a battle in the Alps is re-enacted. At the end, Pacifico is sitting at the kitchen table with the German buyer, talking about life in Berlusconi’s Italy.