Glimmer of light. Notes for a film about a Sense of Place

Raman is a ten-year-old Sikh girl from India. She came to Italy with her mother at the age of four. She has no memory of Punjab, the homeland of her father who had emigrated to the Po River valley six years before his wife. He came to Italy to work as a dairy farmer in the areas where the now-extinct Italian farm workers once lived. Raman is happy to live in the countryside because, as she says, she likes “silent landscapes”. However, she talks about how, after a holiday to Punjab where she had got back in touch with her father’s homeland, she returned to Italy with her mind full of questions... sparking off a comparison between her country of origin and the host country which she now feels is her own. So, seeking to find some answers to these questions, Raman goes to visit the Guru of the Sikh Temple of Vescovato in the province of Cremona. The Guru tells her stories which embody principles dealing with respect for other cultures, for other religions, and for the biodiversity of nature. The young girl thus realises that she had already developed those thoughts by herself, unaware of it, by her silent listening to the landscape of sounds in the countryside, in her words, “when the machines stop”, against the backdrop of the Po River and the countryside between Cremona and Reggio Emilia.