I lost my innocence in 1992, when a Sicilian highway was
torn apart by explosives to kill an anti-mafia judge. And
again, less than 10 years later, at the G8 in Genoa. So,
when I heard about the destruction of a Roma camp in
Northern Italy, I paused. For the teens involved, this would
be their loss of innocence. That moment seemed to distil
so many of today’s struggles into a single scene: racism,
violence against women, power imbalances, the Mafia’s
grip on politics and economics. And then I realised, this
keeps repeating, in different places, on different scales, in
different languages, all across Europe.
Borderland begins as a coming-of-age story in the
suburbs: underground culture, music as self-expression
and collective identity. An immersive journey that shifts
into a crime drama, suffocating the protagonists’ hopes
and dragging them into a social rage that erupts like a
Shakespearean tragedy. A film of flesh, sweat, and blood.
An allegory of Western society’s slide toward populism.