While the tallest building in Europe was being built in prosperous northern Italy during the economic boom, in August 1961 a group of young speleologists headed off to explore the world underground at the other end of the country, a south being abandoned by its inhabitants setting off to try their luck elsewhere.
Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il Buco, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 78th Venice Film Festival, is the abisso del Bifurto, a sinkhole on the south-eastern slopes of the Pollino National Park. Also known as the grotta del Lupo (wolf’s cave), the fissure in the earth at the foothills of the Pollino range sits in a territory with a wealth of karst formations near Cerchiara di Calabria in the province of Cosenza on the border with Basilicata.
The Calabria director recounts the discovery of the cave, taking the viewer underground to a depth of almost 700m, a place dominated by perennial night and silence. The spectacular images of this venture overlap with those of the wild and untouched Calabrian hinterland, where the silence continues but which is flooded with light. All under the careful eye of an elderly shepherd.