Plot
About ten nautical miles of the coast of Trapani in Sicily, there is an archipelago of three small islands. One of these, from a bird’s eye view, is shaped like a butterfly. It is the Island of Favignana.
Both of us have spent a lot of our summers there throughout our lives, as well as many winters, because one of us is the son of islanders and the other has been going to the island on holiday for years with his family. We noticed that the island doesn’t live only off fishing and is not populated exclusively by fishermen with sea salt encrusted and sunburnt faces, it also survives thanks to the women in the community who in very different ways from each other, but almost always attributable to a common thread, hold the reins of Favignana’s life in their hands. At times in extraordinary ways and in our opinion the opposite of what one might expect when talking about a tiny Sicilian town.
The documentary gathers the stories of a dozen of these women who are aged between 17 and 87 years old. Three of them guide us within the film: three women who, like the others, by birth or by choice have made Favignana a decidedly female island.