Traveling across Italy's diverse regions, Canone Effimero discover an alternative popular culture that inspires their uniquely square-format film. Exploring polyvocal songs, music ethnology, and oral tradition, the film unfolds boldly and lyrically, blending modern energy with deep-rooted local authenticity and nature. Beginning as an ode to the slow crafting of a Calabrian zampugna, it expands into an ethnological tour of Italy's small, orally transmitted musical traditions—from Calabria and Marche to Liguria and Sicily. With calm, choral care, the film intertwines landscapes and inhabitants, forging a network of countercultures that redefines nostalgia as radically contemporary.

The instruments are also images of a Mediterranean world meeting with Africa and the East. In the midst of these horizons, voices surface: the polyvocal Arbëreshë women’s songs of Lucanian Pollino, the hypnotic litanies of the Nebrodi Mountains in Sicily, the incredible polyphonic vocal technique from Ceriana in the Ligurian hinterland, and again the lonely splinters from the Marche, folk songs of love and struggle.

Faced with the tendency to file away the margins, Canone Effimero re-focuses our gaze on a little-known landscape. Bodies and landscapes are bound in a 1:1 format. The faces are Byzantine icons or medieval miniatures, the composition eschews the naturalism of documentary filmmaking and approaches statuary or painting. The film thus lives on as autonomous portraits, artifacts unearthed and brought to light, illustrated pages of a collective diary, a fragile code to be completed.