Popoff

It is late at night when a child whom no one has ever seen knocks on the door of Cimino, an elderly man with a somewhat forgetful memory. Wrapped up in several layers of jackets, he has only one question: “Excuse me, sir, have you seen my father by any chance?”. Food is scarce in the village, old grudges that have never been laid to rest are always on the verge of erupting into tragedy, ancient injustices await revenge, and the population is dwindling day by day due to mysterious expulsion letters. Nameless and homeless, the child – renamed Popoff – knows that his parents are somewhere out there and, with the help of the few people willing to lend a hand, he is determined to find them. With the same blend of comedy and tragedy, realism and fairy tale, literary language and dialect that made Sangue di Giuda one of the most acclaimed debuts of recent years, Graziano Gala tells with incredible delicacy the story of little Popoff, who falls in love with votive candles, follows a sweet lullaby sung in the middle of the night from the supermarket speakers, and watches helplessly as the terrible spectacle of human cruelty unfolds. All the while, he never tires of repeating the same desperate question: “Have you seen my father?”.