Water, Is Taught by Thirst

Lopez, a retired teacher, comes across “Water, is taught by thirst” in an old class journal — a haunting poem by Emily Dickinson that in just a few lines reveals how life teaches us the value of things. Mr Lopez has kept everything from that class: homework, essays, even a video diary filmed with the students fifteen years earlier. So much work and goodwill, and yet many of the students in that class dropped out before the end, never earning a diploma. A bitter defeat for the school and for those who had devoted themselves to it with passion. Carried by that poem and by his memories, Mr Lopez feels the need to know what is left of those years spent together; and so he sets out in search of his former students, now “old” thirty-somethings. He brings them, as a gift, the essays he has kept all this time. As they read them together, confessions, stories and moments of school life resurface and almost magically come alive before our eyes: in the footage of the video diary, today's thirty-somethings become teenagers again, full of drive, naivety and enthusiasm for life. Through these difficult years, not everything went the right way: there were also dramatic moments, failures, disappointments. The teacher discovers that none of them is doing the job school had prepared them for. But is school really there to give you a job? Perhaps the finest surprise is that each of them has grown in a different and unpredictable direction, finding within themselves the resources to reinvent who they are: Yari, Jessica, Lorenzo, Gianluca, Corinna, Alessio… Little by little an intimate portrait emerges of each one's destiny, between regrets and dreams, desires and illusions: moving between fragments of past and present, between those tender, unruly pupils and their adult lives, the imprint of the time they spent together takes shape — and with it the story of one class among many, which at times seems to follow the lines of a poem.