The documentary takes shape in the mountains of Val Mongia, in southern Piedmont. Here, director Sandro retraces his personal relationship with his father Ettore, a former motorway toll collector and chestnut grower by vocation, filming him as he goes about his daily work of restoring centuries-old abandoned chestnut groves.
As he observes his father at work, Sandro takes refuge behind the camera to explore the restlessness that drives him away, only to bring him back, time and again, among the chestnut trees. The footage spans twenty years of life, obstacles and growing awareness, documenting the gradual meeting of two worlds: Ettore’s chestnut growing and Sandro’s filmmaking.
The common thread is grafting—the agricultural practice of improving an existing tree by introducing new sap. But the graft is not only natural: it is also generational, affecting a valley as much as a community. Through the director’s lens, the film itself becomes a graft, and Sandro finds his place in a world where the rituals of the elderly women chestnut growers live on through a new generation of custodians tending abandoned lands.
The village comes back to life, just like the forest, and a world that once seemed destined to disappear is reborn from the severed trunk of a past that is still alive.