TITLE: Journey to the Lowlands

A road movie that tells the dream beyond the frontiers of the lowlanders, immersed in a microcosm, still unknown, in which time flows, slowly. There, time is fragmented, blurred and oniric where water has its own music and whispers the stories of the inhabitants. Family ties, my roots, the bucolic landscape, the abandoned places and animals: there in the Emilia of Northern Italy, everything is connected, everything flows and everything remains. I found a story where the eye doesn’t stop but rather proceeds as if you were watching it from a train. Tales of lands below sea level, enclosed by mountain ranges and furrowed by rivers that overflow during the winter season. The dreams of a leftist Emilia, a century ago, have since evaporated; the earthquake has mowed much of the area, the unemployment and alcohol took care of the rest. There, one is accustomed to the dense fog that remains of a vanished peasant world that should not be looked for, but must be felt spiritually. There, the souls of our fathers and mothers echo sounds of a distant time.

AUTHOR: Valeria Sacchetti (Italy)

I was born in Modena.I graduated in Bologna at the faculty of History.
I travelled in several countries carrying out photo reportages for newspapers and magazines in Chile, France, Mexico, Iraq, Serbia and Bosnia.In 2011 I obteined a photography master from “Scuola Romana di Fotografia” with Massimo Mastrorillo and Lina Pallotta as teachers.
From 2011 to 2013, I realised two photographic projects with the association “Vivere Donna” based in Carpi, “ Home sweet home” and then with the anti -violence centre of Reggio Emilia, “ Women at the centre”
( catalogues and exibition).
During the last years I directed my photographic research in Italy, particularly in Rome, Naples and in Emilia Romagna,.
In 2016 I published my first book, “ Generazione resistente”, a ten years work about the partisan movement, with old, new photos and testimonies of hundred people of my region.