Salento in southern Italy. A small family-run textile factory is forced to close and three generations of women must now struggle to keep the wolf from the door. In order to settle their debts their home is sold. Now that her brother has emigrated, it falls to energetic Adele to find a way out of their crisis.

罗马影展上颇受关注的一部黑帮电影，故事讲述法官伊戈纳齐回归故里后，再遇了儿时两小无猜的暗恋对象露西亚。然而，如今生为人母的露西亚，表面是个香水公司的业务代表，实则是当地黑帮的重要人物。一系列的黑帮火拼，让伊戈纳齐在事业和爱情之间犹豫了……暗杀、毒品、暴力、爱情，影片一方面通过女主角视点揭示了一个女子版的黑帮电影世界，又通过男主角视点刻画了一场游走在黑白两道之间的爱恨情仇，兼具爱情和火爆的元素，让本片很有看头。

At Disperata, a small and godforsaken town in Southern Italy, the melancholy mayor Filippo Pisanelli feels terribly unfit for his role. Only a love of poetry and his passion for the literature lessons he gives to prison inmates admit a chink of light into his general state of depression. In jail he meets Pati, a small-time criminal from his own town. Pati and his brother Angiolino were dreaming of becoming the mafia bosses of Capo di Leuca, but the encounter with art changes everything and an unusual friendship between the three men will lead them to make courageous choices: the two now reformed gangsters undergo a genuine conversion to poetry and the beauty of creation, while the mayor finds the courage to defend his ideas, crazy perhaps but ones for which it is worth fighting. The reappearance of the monk seal will be the sign that something has changed. The life of the timid Filippo has been turned upside down and he dives into it headfirst, surrounded at last not by fears but by a peaceful silence. Not only will this odd relationship change the three men but it will also be the harbinger of a rebirth of civic pride in the small community of Disperata.