Fiore mio is a journey to the headwaters, through the soul of a living, changing mountain. With a soundtrack by Vasco Brondi.
It might seem poetic that Monte Rosa takes its name from the pink hue reflected on its peaks at dawn and dusk, but in fact it means "mountain of ice", from rouja, which in the local dialect (patois) means precisely ice. For those living at lower altitudes, ice means water. This element is the connecting thread and guide of Paolo Cognetti's new documentary, Fiore Mio, performed and directed by him at the foot of this mountain of ice — a second home for the writer and director, explored from various perspectives in his books.
Water has always been the "music" at Cognetti's mountain hut in Estoul, in Val d'Ayas, and its deafening absence during the drought-stricken summer of 2022 led him to ask himself many questions and to venture higher in search of its source.
Never mind summit crosses — it's the springs that are the sacred places.
"I read that Tibetans, when a friend sets off on a journey, leave a cup of tea on the table — a prayer for their return. I started doing it too," Cognetti recounts in the track to which he lent his voice on his musician friend Vasco Brondi's album, Ascoltare gli alberi, created as the documentary's soundtrack. It is a gesture seen in the documentary itself, and one that finds its explanation in this track.
"In the morning I go walking, I follow the watercourses, I climb back up the streams until they grow thinner and thinner. Finding the source — sometimes just a trickle beneath the rock — moves me as if we were in a desert. In Tibet I saw that springs are protected by small structures, four dry-stone walls built around the spot where the water emerges. Perhaps simply to keep animals from dirtying it, but then people bring offerings there, flowers, and they become shrines. We should do the same. Never mind summit crosses — it's the springs that are the sacred places. With that water I fill a bottle, and then I fill the wooden cup on my table. Come back, please — that's what the cup seems to say in silence."
Cognetti thus sets out on a journey on foot, together with his four-legged companion Laki, towards the springs and through the vast alpine landscapes characterised by their apparent silences — silences that are in reality full of sounds and of their inhabitants: wild animals, but also the people who tend the high-mountain refuges. "I wanted the characters in the film to live like animals, to also be above all bodies, gestures, parts of the mountain," Cognetti explains. "Not too many words. I wanted to catch them in what they do, to enter their intimacy with the same silence and the same patience."
The documentary is a visual and sonic immersion into the soul of the mountain, into its transformation and its aliveness. A quest that immediately becomes an act of listening — to the environment, to water, but also to ourselves, to our own thoughts, in order to find the strength to face environmental and climate challenges.
Cognetti takes us to three high-altitude refuges, offering us, through the words of those who inhabit them, a vision of the mountain made of silences, expanded time, sharing and listening.
There is the Orestes hutte, the first vegan refuge in the Alps, with Arturo and his 80 years of life in those valleys, which he continues to explore at his own pace, and his daughter Marta, who feels herself to be the custodian of the refuge but not of the mountain. The journey then leads to the Quintino Sella al Felik, one of the highest refuges in Europe, with Corinne's smile and the openness of Sete, the Nepalese sherpa who brings his whole self — from the Himalayas to the Alps.
Finally, the Mezzalama hut, which overlooks the Val d'Ayas and sits just below the glacier, where seracs can often be seen breaking off. From there, heading up towards the Lambronecca (the Guide d'Ayas hut), one comes across an ephemeral lake, one of those given that name because they form from the melting of glaciers, and no one knows how long they will remain.
All ice disappearing, ice centuries and millennia old that saves us during drought and will keep doing so until the end. Blessed glacier, holy glacier. On Monte Rosa I once went with the spirit of an alpinist; now I go as a pilgrim.
This journey takes us soaring in balance with a bird of prey and into the mouth of the glacier, among the trees at the lowest altitudes and into the thoughts of those who have always lived in this valley, like Remigio, and who cherish it in the "in-between seasons", when it empties out and the mountain reclaims its own rhythms and colours.
The documentary, moving and introspective, is a pilgrimage towards the soul of the mountain, an invitation to touch and understand its changes, and to come into contact with ourselves. "It's not a film about how we can save the mountain. This is a film about how the mountain might save us."