Most of the crew died in the explosion. Fourteen men remained alive in the stern, 30 meters below the seabed. Ships, submarines, and divers came to rescue them.
The captive sailors waited, communicating with rescuers on the surface via the telephone buoy's wire. The wind picked up, it began to snow, and the rescue effort was suspended.
They all died.
Sixty years later, Pietro Spirito, a journalist and writer, becomes an explorer of memories. He wants to understand what happened and why the Medusa's sailors were not saved. This explorer of memories visits places and archives, meets family members, eyewitnesses, and experts in submarine warfare, collects photographs of the crew, dives to the site of the sinking, watches period films, collects fragments of memory, and imagines the events of those days like an animated film. He puts together the pieces of this emotional puzzle.
Medusa aims to be a special kind of documentary. Not just an investigation into a historical event; not just a succession of testimonies and documents, mostly unpublished. The film unfolds through stages and registers that are sometimes discordant, even jarring to the professional historian. Where memories, photographs, and documents are insufficient to explain or evoke images and emotions, the explorer of memories "mentally reconstructs the scene" like a cartoon.
Medusa tells of men waiting to be rescued, of others who attempted to bring them back to the surface of the sea. It tells of weapons and torpedoes, of life-saving devices that failed, of archetypes, of destinies and death.
Medusa follows an emotional journey. It tells of memory that reveals what has been hidden even from ourselves. Of memory that frays and transforms, until it becomes the memory of forgetfulness.
