Independent British distributors New Wave Films are set to release Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte (2010). Last year, the film won the Label Europa Cinemas Award for Best European Film in the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.
An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, but believes that he can find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.
A new goat kid is born. We follow its first few tentative steps, its first games, until it gains strength and goes to pasture. Nearby, a majestic tree stirs in the mountain breeze and slowly changes through the seasons, until transformed into fuel through the ancestral work of the local Calabrian charcoal makers.
A beautiful and poetic vision of the revolving cycles of life and nature in the unbroken traditions of a timeless place, Le Quattro volte appears as the metaphor of a soul that moves through four successive states of being.