directed by Francesca Lixi | 2018 / 52′ / 70′

mid-1920s. A Sardinian bank clerk, Mario Garau, is sent to China by Credito Italiano to work as an officer at the Italian Bank of China, in the offices of Tientsin and Shanghai. That bank clerk was my uncle. When I was a child, several trunks that had belonged to him arrived in my home, filled with memorabilia, 8mm films, and photographs. These exotic objects, along with the few pieces of information I had about this relative, crowded my imagination for decades and led me to carry out extensive research into this mysterious figure. I tried to travel alongside him, to discover whether it might be possible to tell and understand the complexity of other people’s lives through the events that shaped them—uncovering the fragments of the intricate web that lies between our own lives and those of the real or imagined figures who have formed us.