ITALY / FRANCE - 2014 - 86 MIN - COLOUR - FEATURE - IN ITALIAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
A FILM BY JONATHAN NOSSITER
Four Italian winegrowers live a life we all dream of: Giovanna Tiezzi and Stefano Borsa in their converted 11th century monastery and winery in Tuscany find a way to grow grains, fruits and wine that creates a link to their ancient Etruscan heritage; Corrado Dottori and Valerio Bochi, refugees from industrial Milan in their grandfather’s farmstead in the magical Marches labour for a rural expression of social justice; ex-librarian Elena Pantaleoni working her father’s vineyards in Emilia, strives to make her estate a utopian reality; and then Stefano Bellotti, the Pasolini of Italian agriculture, a radical farmer poet, disrupts everyone's rules from his avant garde farm in the Piedmont.
But these protagonists of a rapidly spreading European natural wine revolution have encountered fierce resistance. Not everyone believes in their struggle for an ecologically progressive, economically just and historically rich expression of Italian agriculture. With the help of their delightfully eccentric film curator friend Gian Luca Farinelli, these very contemporary peasants use the power of fiction films to combat the institutional lies that make any act of freedom today an act of dangerous dissent.
10 years after Mondovino, the wine world has changed just like the world itself. The enemy is now far greater than the threat of globalization. It’s everywhere and nowhere. It’s them. And us. But these natural wine rebels against the "New World Economic Order", offer a model of charmed and joyous resistance. NATURAL RESISTANCE mixes documentary and fiction in the hope of stirring the hidden rebel inside all of us...