Elisabetta Sgarbi continues her journey into the vanguard and after Quiproquo, a film focused on Italy, she exits the national borders in order to ask directors, writers, intellectuals what happened to this term often abused, misinterpreted, yet crawling in our culture.
Hanif Kureshi, Salman Rushdie, Jane Campion, Vikram Seth, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Wole Soyinka, Jon Krakauer, Joyce Carol Oates are just a few of the personalities taking part in this investigation answering the questions by Eugenio Lio. Some of them just brushed vanguards, others kept the distance from them. For some of them, coming from other continents, this word has a different meaning from the one in Western countries. For others vanguard is the ultimate destiny of mankind, it has still to come.
With its accurate and discreet look, the film never lets go, it lets the characters speak creating a rich and colourful mosaic with a constant hue of irony. And apart from irony, the film contains also a piece of Italy despite being rigorously international. It is a piece in which there seems to be very little vanguard, but there is though, there is an handcrafted and exquisite vanguard art: the pottery by Federico Bonaldi.