Shun Li and the Poet

Shun Li works in a textile factory in the outskirts of Rome in order to get her papers and enable her eight-year-old son to come to Italy. She is suddenly transferred to Chioggia, a small city-island in the Veneto lagoon, to work as a bartender in a pub. Bepi, a Slavic fisherman, nicknamed ‘the Poet’ by his friends, has been a regular at that little pub for years. Their encounter is a poetic escape from solitude, a silent dialogue between two different cultures, yet not so distant. It is an odyssey into the deep heart of a lagoon, which can be both the mother and cradle of identities, which never keep still. But the friendship between Shun Li and Bepi upsets both the Chinese and local communities, who interfere with this new voyage, perhaps because it scares them.