This is the story of an old asylum and the place where it was born, Girifalco, a Calabrian village of six thousand souls. The psychiatric hospital, founded in 1881, and the inhabitants of the village have always had a symbiotic relationship. Thanks to the ‘open doors’ practices initiated in the early 20th century, patients considered less serious wandered freely through the streets of the village. Madness and normality thus merged into a peculiar fresco that over the centuries has made Girifalco known in Italy and around the world as the ‘Land of the Mad’. The inhabitants, far from experiencing that appellation as a stigma, are very proud of their identity. What happens, however, to that little hamlet when the asylum is closed and ‘the mad’ leave? And is a madman still mad even if no one calls him that any more? What are we when they stop calling us by our usual name?
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June 27 | 1.00am |
25'
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