From Venice to Naples, Palermo to Rome, Milan to Pisa, Futura allows us to hear what young people think about the most relevant things in their lives: study, work, the economy, social networks, their parents, politicians, the environment, and how they hope to see themselves when they become adults.

Three Italian filmmakers made plans to travel separately around their country with the idea of asking young people about the future, and they set out on this journey in early 2020. The first part of their documentary does indeed focus on these young people, to discuss their dreams and fears about the future. However, the only thing that neither the directors nor the interviewees could imagine was that this future was going to change radically from one day to the next because of the arrival of COVID-19 and how that would end up altering everybody’s plans and ideas.

When we meet these kids again after a few months of fear and lockdowns, we can tell they have been profoundly altered by the impact of their recent experiences and that they will no longer be the same. Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro), Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden), and Francesco Munzi (Black Souls), three of the most interesting voices in contemporary Italian filmmaking, spent months traveling through Italian towns and villages, listening respectfully and with an open mind to what teenagers have to say and many young people from every part of society seized upon this opportunity, a generation trying to make its way in life, in Italy’s social and political system. The result is an incisive portrait of a generation, packed with thoughtful, moving, and confrontational perspectives on their future. What emerges is a poignant picture of their precociousness, as they face incredible new pressures, but also of their extraordinary resilience, in this work of intermingled pessimism and possibility.