Niente da ridere

Niente da ridere recounts the story of a thirty-five-year-old man burdened with the responsibility of caring for a very large, extended family whose diverse needs he must satisfy: from hosting relatives, distant friends, and strangers, to giving money to his uncle to ease his pressing demands, even inventing obligations just to work in peace, secretly, in the countryside farmhouse—far from his daughters, his wife, and the loud chaos of a life he seems to flee from, though in reality he is its very center.

A character both lively and melancholic, generous and narcissistic, enchanted and cynical, who indefinitely postpones an impending nervous breakdown with the help of anxiolytics. In short, the perfect man of our time, portrayed with a tumultuous and untamable language, in a sparkling weave of situations alternating between the comic and the grotesque, set in an unconventional Salento—far from the stereotypes cinema and literature have accustomed us to—yet in certain sudden glimpses of landscape, its wild beauty emerges in full.