A glitch crackled through the black screen for some seconds, and then five figures appeared, in red and yellow oilskins, amid a storm. This was footage of the boat Fila crossing the Atlantic, a voyage during which my father and his crewmates filmed themselves with a video camera right until minutes before disaster. The other men on the tapes were Giovanni Soldini, Andrea Tarlarini, Guido Broggi and Bruno Laurent. To me, at the time, they were strangers.
In one shot, while at the helm, my father Andrea looks into the camera. The moment our eyes met, I recognized him. His face, voice and gestures were like a thunderbolt. He felt familiar and at the same time unknown. I felt a burst of deep joy, and at the same time fear, rage.
Those images – resurfacing from a past I did not remember – shook me profoundly. Right away I began to wonder if there were other videos of my father I was unaware of. I had the feeling that through these materials I would finally be able to meet him, get to know him and, perhaps, understand what had happened to him.

Thus began a search that, over four years, led me to collect an enormous archive of material: 8 mm film shot by my grandfather, family films of my parents, industrial videos in which I saw my father for the first time as a young engineer, working on the Moro di Venezia at the Tencara Shipyard, and in the great regattas and crossings with Giovanni Soldini. There were many photographs and newspaper articles, as well as his logbooks, notes and nautical designs.
And finally, and most significantly, two audio cassettes recorded by my father during the Mini Transat, a solo regatta he had tackled on an old six-meter wooden boat called American Express that he had repaired and restored. During those long hours at sea my father would talk to my then-pregnant mother, imagining their life together after my birth.
He was always divided, torn between his visceral desire for the sea, adventure, discovery and speed, which had brought him on his own to the middle of the Atlantic, and his love for and devotion to his family.
The deeper I went into my research, the more I realized that I knew nothing about the whole world that had animated and shaped his life – and that eventually killed him. I knew nothing about boats, aerodynamics or regattas. The sea was a stranger to me. And yet his passion infected me immediately. I wanted to know everything about how a boat works, how it is designed, constructed and sailed; how storms in the oceans are formed and how sailors decide their route. I wanted to know everything he loved and I had lost.

This documentary has been a difficult and painful journey for me, my mother and my family, a journey that led me to meet many people who had shared their youth with my father and his dream of sailing into the unknown until his very last moments. People I did not know but who were also deeply impacted by my father’s death and who generously entrusted me with their memories. The meeting with Giovanni Soldini and the crew of the Fila was fundamental, as was the one with my uncle Marco, my father’s brother, whom I barely knew and with whom I began to restore the small American Express boat that had been abandoned for years at a Monfalcone boatyard. My uncle had managed to locate it years earlier but had never found the courage to restore it. We did it together, turning back to my father’s designs and putting our hands exactly where he, too, as my mother told me, had spent many nights working and many hours sailing.
Now the boat is ready and waiting to sail the sea again.

This documentary stems from an intimate and personal need to discover who my father really was and to sew back together what his death seemed to have torn apart forever. But my film is also a reflection on the value of memory, and the relationship between voice, gaze and the formation of a person’s identity.
Facing the pain of absence and loss, I discovered the power of love and passion, the forces that move and fill life with flashes of happiness. I found what truly remains.