On Tuesday, December 30, 2025, at 9:00 pm, the Cesuna Library will host the screening of "I recuperanti" (1970), one of Ermanno Olmi's most intense and significant films, set on the Asiago Plateau after World War II, between 1945 and the first years following the end of World War II.

The film tells the story of men who, in order to survive the poverty of the post-war period, go up the mountains in search of the war remnants of the First World War - scrap metal, ordnance, military materials - to resell as metal. A very hard and dangerous activity, which brings to light a front that continues to kill even after the end of the conflicts.

The protagonist is Gianni, a veteran of the Russian campaign, who returns to the Plateau without being able to find a job or a place in the new society that is being born. His meeting with the old Du, an almost legendary figure and former soldier who lives on recoveries, begins a journey through trenches, tunnels, war cemeteries and paths marked by history, along the ancient front lines.

The film is both social chronicle and reflection on memory: the war seems to have ended, but continues in the mutilated bodies, in the poverty of the mountaineers and in the explosions that still claim victims. 

Olmi focuses on two men on the margins: the young man who has no place in the present and the old man belonging to another time, telling of an Italy suspended between misery, desire for rebirth and attempts to remove the past.

With its unmistakable style, made up of almost documentary-like registers, essential dialogues and a mountain landscape that becomes a character in all respects, The Salvagers is now considered one of the most important works in the representation of the Venetian mountains and in the reflection on the material and moral legacies of the Great War.

Free admission subject to availability.

Discover also the other events of the Christmas period in Cesuna!

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