Bergamo, March 2020. The city inside its walls, is a diseased body. It is a whole of cells, tissues, organs that do not interact anymore. The streets are now empty, no one speaks, no one meets. Isolated from the others, each body is lonely, inside the walls. Each picture, each memory is only a blurred memory of the mosaic that until yesterday formed the city. In the hospital, the bodies, laying paralyzed in the dark of the night, cannot breathe anymore. Doctors and nurses are the guardians of those bodies to comfort, revive, sedate, dispose; bodies that guard fragments of memories that emerge from the dark of the soul. After the nightmares of this endless night, survivors open their eyes in a new city. The desire to return home is strong, as strong is the fear not to find who was left behind. They catch the eyes of the others, hoping to find comfort behind those masks. In their silence, they try to find the words to share what happened, to express their gratitude and their sense of guilt for surviving. The body of the city is a devastated body that tries to react. Doctors, nurses, patients, volunteers and people spared from the pain of the disease, look for their role in the general healing and recovering process. Collecting and sharing the stories of who is not with us anymore, becomes a way to grieve and finding a new way to mourn for death. The Mura di Bergamo is a movie that connects past and future, that supports the community through the patient work of reconstruction of that intimate, familiar, social tissue that the pandemic has destroyed. The hero of this story is the city, a social body that, like every other living being, is made of endless connections. Words, glances, gestures, silences told in this movie aim to remind us such connections, with the hope that, making them visible to others, they could revive through the screenplay.
