Porpora Marcasciano

Italy, 1970. An increasing legion of harmless warriors begins a peaceful struggle for sexual freedom through pornography, shaking and shocking religious authorities and conservative political institutions. They are ironic, happy, crazy. They are dreamers, defenders of definitive communion between body and soul. But they were censored and humiliated. They were mistreated and arrested for demanding loud a new cultural renaissance.

From her roots in Southern Italy to her landing in Bologna, the trans leader Porpora Marcasciano relives her self-discovery, from a negated identity to battles for human rights.

It often happens that at the moment of death, transgender individuals are shorn of their identity. Their families are ashamed, the funeral takes place in secret, and on the tomb appears the name the deceased had before their transition, in one stroke nullifying the entire life path they had chosen. The same thing happened to Antonia. Her girlfriends gather to honor her memory and give her back her identity denied. In telling her story, the film’s stars, all drawn from the variegated transgender world, interweave the narrative with tales of their own lives, experiences, and memories.

Poet and writer Antonio Veneziani, the youngest representative of the Scuola Romana literary current, which was championed by Pasolini and Moravia and included counter-culture artists such as Dario Bellezza and Renzo Paris, is writing a book of interviews with transsexual people. As he meets with people from varied and sometimes contrasting paths of life, he also begins a quest to find where his late friend Vinicio Diamanti, a well known actor who has often performed in drag, has been buried. A meditation on Life, Death and the need for a new law in Italy through the prism of the trans-gender experience.