PALMARIA (WT)

Time itself compresses in the Gulf of La Spezia. Everything happens at once. Cruise ships dock at dawn. Tourists pour in like waves. Fincantieri workers return from night shifts. Military technicians clock in at a half-empty arsenal. The shipyards hum in the background. But beneath sea level, a world emerges. Down there, among waters and silences compressed by pressure, divers train for survival. Men in a trained darkness, in conditions that teach them to go without air, without time, without weight. It is the submerged portion of a world that exists for only a few. The divers comb the seabed searching for mines, invisible to the tourist sipping a cocktail on the deck of a floating shopping mall. Palmaria is a choral and visionary film that tells the story of a day and a night in the Gulf — a brilliant and dense territory where separate worlds exist without ever interacting. The narration of a present that still carries the echo of the past.