For the three "mountain dwellers," these were years of endless travel in a ramshackle van, sharing alternative life experiences and the battles that fueled the opposition movement with all the intensity and enthusiasm of youth.
Then, like all stories, their partnership also ends.
Everyone's lives are no longer compatible with the commitment that the project requires. China requires: work, children and new interests require different choices.
Those three mountain boys are now in their fifties, with their professions, their passions, their families.
Looking back, those years seem to carry with them the question that suggested the title of KINA's most successful album: If I won, if I lost…
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
There are stories that deserve to be told.
Some you discover one day, by chance. And the next day you're ready to tackle them. To give them shape. That's what happened with my previous work, Coal Sea.
Others need time. They remain there, in the drawer of memories. They layer, open to different perspectives, and mature silently, without you even noticing.
They change as you change. They grow with you. Until, at a certain point in your journey, you feel the moment has come. That that story belongs to you, and telling it also means telling your story. And that doing so has become a necessity.
This is the case of If I won if I lost.
I had been thinking for years about the story – the little legend – of the China, to make a film about them.
Only one thing was missing: the key to not reducing the film to a simple music documentary, which would have been the greatest possible betrayal of their band. Because what makes Kina truly interesting – perhaps unique – in the European underground scene is precisely the impossibility of separating music from life, the need for expression from daily commitments.
And it wasn't possible to tell everything with detachment, without getting involved...
