A Christmas Mystery

Taranto, Italy, 1997. The worker Caterino Lamanna lives in a farmhouse that has fallen into disgrace due to its proximity to the steel industry and is about to get married to Anna with whom he shares the dream of going to live in the city. When the company managers decide to make him a spy to identify the workers it would be best to get rid of, Caterino begins to shadow his colleagues with the aim of reporting them. Soon, not understanding its degradation, he too asked to be placed in the Palazzina LAF (acronym for cold rolling mill), the Ilva lager department reserved for "uncomfortable" workers. It will be there that Caterino will discover that what he thought was paradise is actually hell. Through the eyes of a worker, one of the most serious cases of workplace abuse in Italian history is told. The title of the work takes up the name of the building of the same name, adjacent to the cold rolling mill, of which the events are told, in which in the 1990s the owners and managers of Ilva of Taranto, at the time of the events already part of the Group Riva, decided to confine the employees who had opposed the "novation" of the contract, i.e. the downgrading to workers, an illegal and dangerous practice for the workers themselves. The film is based on the book "Fumo sulla città" by the Italian writer Alessandro Leogrande, who died prematurely, who should also have participated in the creation of the screenplay and to whom the film is dedicated. It is the first movie directed by Michele Riondino.