A Land Under the Nails: A Filmmaker’s Journey of Return and Restitution

“And to end is to begin: the end is where we start” writes Thomas Eliot. She left early, studied film history in Dublin, documentary experimentation in Edinburgh, then a return and again an escape: DocNomads is a two-year international master’s degree in Documentary filmmaking funded by the European Union (Erasmus Mundus) designed to train future documentary directors with a contemporary artistic approach. It takes her to Lisbon, Budapest, Brussels.

What holds all these departures together?

I believe that every time you leave a land, that land gets stuck under your nails. I onyl started to understand what “Sardinia” really was when I found it in my head while I was living elsewhere. In Ireland, above all: there I saw what it means to grow up in a country that still bears the weight of colonialism. The unsaid, the wounded identity, the anger transformed into action. From them I learned to look at myself in the mirror: our belonging is something that was taken away from us and returned to us in pieces. And when you grow up like this,leaving isn’t a romantic choice: it’s an urgency that is instilled in you. But leaving doesn’t save you. It only forces you to deal with the question you avoid: what land are you really from?

In the emerged land this conflict is felt, almost like a contrary wind.Even the introduction that she translated into sardinian, inspired by Canne al vento by Grazia Deledda, seems like a political statement.

Yes, as language is always political.Translating that text into my variant of Sardinian was an intimate gesture, a small act of restitution. For years we hid our accent, almost as if it were a fault. I myself, as a girl, noticed that the more I talked, the more I seemed to lose value. As if my voice said too much about me, too much about us. Then I realized that it’s exactly the opposite: the accent tells where you come from, who raised you, what wounds you carry.It is never a decrease, it is a root. And cinema, if it doesn’t take root, says nothing.

The protagonist of the film, Sara, comes from Nebida, a paradise with very high cancer rates. The territory as wealth and as a wound.

Nebida is a beautiful body that suffers. Like many parts of Sardinia it has been exploited, emptied, poisoned. When I talk about colonialism I don’t use a metaphor: it really happened, and continues to happen. The territory is stripped of its pulp and then accused of not “knowing how to live in the world”.Sara lives in that paradox: she loves her land, but that same land kills. From here comes the question that runs through the entire film: how can you feel part of a place that doesn’t protect you? Yet it is indeed right there, in