Valstagna, Canale di Brenta, Vicenza: on small “plots of land” that once cultivated tobacco fate is playing against very diverse characters, engaged in giving new life to a landscape terraced mostly in a state of abandonment. There is one who remains with obstinacy and pride to the old power of the family, who leaves his place as a worker in a cave to rediscover himself, who coming from an urban world decides to take charge of the fields and dry stone walls thanks to an innovative project of adoption, and who is originally from Morocco cultivates the dream of integration for his own children. Piccola Terra is a message of hope for the marginal mountains, a story of universal values linked to the earth, that is independent of economic interests, political impediments, and cultural barriers. The “world of the defeated” of the sixties, here immortalized by the director Giuseppe Taffarel, today is a mountain that returns to life.

Michele Trentini, born in Rovereto in 1974, is graduated in sociology at the University of Dresda with a thesis in an anthropologic view of ecological communitarianism in eastern Germany. He is active in research and documentation utilizing methods in visual anthropology and is author of various documentaries, among which is Furriadroxus (Best Documentary Festival Arcipelago Rome 2006 and Special Mention Cinemambiente Torino 2006), Cheyenne, trent’anni  (Premio Libero Bizzari 2010, First Prize Valsusa Film Fest 2009), Il canto scaltro (Premio Nigra- Antropologia Visiva 2009) and Carnival King of Europe (Grand Prize for Academic Film, Kyoto Universtity Academic Film Expo 2009).