Sapiens Production
Sulle tracce del Prete Rosso
A feature documentary by Antonio Manco · 87' · Release 2027
Logline
Following writer Giuseppina Togni through the Valle Verzasca, the film explores how a controversial family legend still lives today — in archives, faces, landscapes and silence.
Synopsis
Giuseppina Togni returns to the Valle Verzasca to face a centuries-old family legend: the story of Sebastiano De Rubeis, the Red Priest, from whom she herself descends. Through encounters with the people of the valley — farmers, descendants, keepers of churches and archives — the film explores how this controversial figure still lives on in bodies, places and silences. The illustrations do not reconstruct the past: they reveal its gaps. A journey into inheritance, community memory and the courage to look at an origin that has never fully disappeared.
A chorus from the valley
A farmer who knows his cows by the sound of their bells. A sacristan who still rings the bells her parents rang. The last resident priest of the valley. Red-haired children who carry the legend without having asked for it. Together, they don't close the story — they keep it alive.
The past, in fragments
Sebastiano De Rubeis never shows his face. His story surfaces only in fragments, in illustrations by Hannes Binder: gestures, shadows, missing pages. They appear only when the present opens a passage to the past — not to fill the gaps, but to show them.
Director's note
The more I filmed in the valley, the clearer it became: the heart of this film is not the attempt to reconstruct Sebastiano, but what remains of him today. Giuseppina is its living centre — a scientist who approaches the past through documents, and a descendant who discovers that origin is also carried in gestures, stories and people. I want to film the Valle Verzasca not as a postcard, but as a living archive: stones, paths, churches, emptied houses, family names. No revelations, no scandal — a patient, observational film, built on encounters and silence. Every community inherits stories that are incomplete and uncomfortable. This one asks how to look at them without simplifying.
— Antonio Manco
The journey of the film
01Research (since 2020)
02Encounters in the valley- 03Shooting (2026)
04Editing (2026–27)
05Release (2027)
The film
- Feature documentary
- 87'
- Switzerland (Ticino, Valle Verzasca)
- Written, directed and produced by Antonio Manco
- With Giuseppina Togni and the people of the Valle Verzasca
- Illustrations: Hannes Binder
- In production
- Release 2027
Giuseppina Togni has also told the story of Sebastiano De Rubeis in her book «Il prete rosso» (Armando Dadò Editore, 2012).
Gallery
