The film unfolds through a series of memories that unfold between the punk revolution and the late 80s, tracing the journey of a young man searching for the roots of his present, an invisible path through music, places, emotions, and dreams.
The resulting generational diary is a living and breathing testimony to the vitality of the Italian provinces, amidst similarities and divergences generated by a widespread desire for change—a "common feeling" that transcends place of origin.
The portrait of an era destined to last as long as its myth, the "new golden dream" suspended in the shadow of an imagination that still today has not lost its allure.
“The Missing Boys” is a film born from the need to tell the story of the emergence and growth of a forgotten music scene, like much of the youth movement that spread from metropolitan areas to the provinces more than forty years ago, facing the same critical issues at every latitude, albeit with different dynamics.
It's a story of bands, unknown or almost, from Sardinia, especially Cagliari and Sassari, who are breaking the blissful isolation of an island only apparently distant from the revolution that ignited wherever there was a stage and a power outlet.
The genesis of a journey that began with punk and quickly transformed into a magmatic fresco where research, experimentation, auditory subversions and shards of darkness shape a multifaceted scene, balanced between affinities and divergences with everything around it and, precisely for this reason, unique in its kind.
The period covered in the film is between 1979 and 1989, a seminal decade linked to an indelible generational transition, like an imaginary journey "from ants to clouds", an invisible thread suspended between those kids and their great dream.
DIRECTOR'S NOTES
The Missing Boys It represents the cinematic reconstruction of an extremely important historical period, characterized by a generational divide that produced changes such as to generate the emergence of new anthropological models – social, cultural and aesthetic – destined to transform the perception of the contemporary world.
The scenarios and places proposed in the film constitute a key to understanding that refers to the main concept of the project: to trace a path that starts from the bottom to arrive at defining the obligatory steps in the genesis of a spontaneous movement, generated by the expressive urgency and the need to produce an expected and irreversible change.
The invisible thread that weaves the narrative through semi-hidden or dimly lit environments, such as underground passages, tunnels, crypts, avenues, alleys, tunnels, and stairways, expresses the seminal nature of an individual rather than a collective revolution, capable of recognizing itself through common traits such as music, aesthetics, and a vision of life rather than through sharing a common ideology.
The subjects mostly move within structures characterized by delimited spaces, sometimes subtly claustrophobic, as if to represent the extreme caesura with anything that could contaminate their purity, originality, and message.
In this sense, the presence of historic buildings with curvilinear architectural elements as well as urban galleries represents a symbolism linked to the detachment of the umbilical cord between that generation and its roots, the overcoming of maternal protection represented by a mental as well as objective isolation, a journey in search of one's peers, at any latitude and at any cost.
The choice to reduce editing to a minimum is aimed at maintaining the immediacy of the testimonies and the exact perception of the contents of the story, both in the first and third person.
