Menocchio

Italy, at the end of the 16th century. Feeling its hegemony threatened by the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church launches the first systematic ideological war by a State for total control over consciences. Designed in those very years, the new confessional booth morphs from a place for consoling souls into a tribunal for minds. Listening, spying and denouncing neighbours become compulsory practices, with punishments being excommunication, imprisonment or the stake. Menocchio, an old, stubborn self-taught miller in a small forsaken village amongst the mountains in Friuli, decides to rebel. Wanted for heresy, he does not listen to his pleading friends and family members and faces the trial instead of escaping or recanting. He is not only fed up with impositions, abuse, taxes and unfairness. As a man, Menocchio is genuinely convinced he is equal to bishops, to the inquisitors and even to the Pope, so much so that he inwardly hopes, feels and believes he can reconvert them to an ideal of poverty and love.