A documentary that bears witness to a life lived by making films thinking of human beings with a return to a form of expression, the documentary, which Olmi had never completely abandoned. The director tells us about the last three Terra Madre conferences in Turin. On those occasions (and particularly in 2006) Carlo Petrini, the creator of Slow Food, managed to bring to the capital of Piedmont people who, in every corner of the world, love the land, cultivate it and, above all, respect it. Olmi's documentary is a denunciation of this. It denounces the abuse of power that also in this field does not clash with the rigors of the law because it is the Market God who dictates the non-rules of the most unbridled liberalism. But it is not only this. Thanks also to the collaboration with Piavoli and Zaccaro Olmi, Olmi brings to the screen an act of deep love that goes from the elegy of life in contact with Nature to the respectful and almost envious reflection on the life of a man who had the courage to abandon the civilization of consumption to choose to live in a radically different way. Olmi also reminds us that someone thought of preserving, in the North of our continent, the seeds that risked disappearing permanently by creating a sort of Garden of Eden in the ice. The Cineteca di Bologna, which has intervened in the production, is certainly aware of having contributed to the creation of a film that is a seed. Its task is now to preserve it but also to put it in place wherever possible so that it can ripen that precious fruit that is awareness.

The first note that Carlo Petrini sent me was dated 1 July 2006. And he says: "this will be a political and prescient film to make known to all those who do not know yet, those positive examples that the Communities of farmers around the world and the Slow Food Presidia will show during the great gathering Terra Madre 2006 in Turin. And I, of course, was among those of our time who did not know the solidarity of intent witnessed in this worldwide gathering of all the peasant people. Men and women who in their land still resist the pressure of a criminal policy of exasperated and devastating exploitation of fertile soils, the only resource for food for all peoples. A heroic testimony of eternal and loyal alliance with nature and its fruits. An alliance that has no language barriers, no divisions of ideologies and religions, no borders of states. At the Terra Madre Forum I recognized the peasants as I remembered them in our countryside at the time of my childhood. The faces of the peasants are similar in every corner of the world. They are faces on which one can recognize the same traces of life, as well as the physiognomies of landscapes with ploughed fields, crops, pastures. Today, that world of farmers is besieged by the great enterprises whose purpose is profit. The farmer also wants to earn, but his attachment to the land is also an act of love and it is in this feeling of solidarity that respect for Nature is generated. I am sure that these honest citizens will never betray their Earth. And we metropolitan citizens, who live in our cities canned, without the colors and scents of the seasons perhaps, in a very near day, if we happen to pass next to a garden where a grandfather and a little girl pick the ripe fruit, then we can still recognize the true home of man.
(Ermanno Olmi)