Alessandra Coppola’s timely feature-length documentary captures a group of young Italians seeking restitution through, for and on behalf of their land. La Restanza is screening as part of The Politics of Food, Delfina Foundation’s series of residences and public events interrogating the ethics and politics of food production, distribution and consumption – which this year is focused on extinction, mutation, preservation and restitution.

Castiglione d’Otranto in Puglia, southern Italy, is a village that people generally flee as soon as they can. But when a group of people in their thirties refuse to accept leaving as the only possible response to the economic, ecological and political collapse of their territory, Castiglione becomes the village of the Restanza (literally, ‘remainder’) – a place where farming is not individual but collective, promoting local biodiversity and reconnecting with the land in search of a different future.