The Land of Sons

Screening with introduction by Prof. Elena Past

Directed by Claudio Cupellini, 2021, 106”

The end of civilization has arrived. It is not known what caused this cataclysm, but the apocalypse has wiped out a large part of humanity and the earth has stopped bearing fruit. A Father and his Son are among the few survivors. The Son grows up like a wild beast, as the Father teaches this is the only way to survive. When the Father dies, the Son decides to undertake a journey along a mysterious river in a hostile world, moved by the desire to discover what was forbidden to him, but above all in search of someone who can read to him the words written by The Father in the journal he kept for all his life.

The Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago has invited Elena Past, Professor of Italian in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, at Wayne State University to introduce the screening of the movie “The Land of Sons,” directed by Claudio Cupellini, with a reflection on the relationships between freedom and ecological responsibility, looking at how a more conscious and ethical approach to our relationship with nature is fundamental to the fight against climate change. 

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Elena Past is Professor of Italian in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, at Wayne State University, and co-editor of The Italianist Film Issue with Danielle Hipkins and Monica Seger. In 2022, she was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (2021-22) and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar (2022). Her books include Italian Cinema Beyond the Human (2019), winner of the Modern Language Association’s Howard R. Marraro Prize; Methods of Murder: Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction (2012); and the co-edited collections Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies: Italy and the Environmental Humanities (with Serenella Iovino and Enrico Cesaretti, 2018) and Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film (with Deborah Amberson, 2014).

This event is part of ‘Freedoms,’ an event series organized by Chicago members of European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) in fall 2022 that examines how conceptions of freedom have been shaped by each country’s unique history.