Letters from the Desert (2010)

• 83%
• 2010
• Documentary
• Michela Occhipinti

The world runs. Hari walks. His worn-out shoes cover long distances in the desert to deliver messages that are closed in letters with a precious handwriting for addressees who live in remote villages, cloistered in a forgotten temporal dimension, out of this world. The letters talk about loves, weddings, successes and deceases, those that bear news of death are immediately recognizable, the envelopes with the right corner torn off, those that Hari reads out in the doorway, and then tears to bits, because bad news must be destroyed, scattered, deleted forever. In a world in which time is luxury, speed is synonymous with efficiency and civilization, and in which people communicate pressing buttons that reproduce identical characters, the story of Hari is an island fossilized in time. When the only way to communicate was a sheet of paper, a pen, some ink. When people were still able to wait. A return to slowness, and to nature, the harsh nature of the Thar desert. Until some weird metallic towers arrive, as intruders in the landscape, to revolutionize the life of the small village...