In January 2003, Pippo Delbono's theater company crossed Israel and Palestine with its show Guerra. It is an atypical, visionary and dazzling show, centralized on the presence of actors like Bobò, an elderly deaf-mute who lived for fifty years in a psychiatric hospital, from which Delbono took him out to build his experience around him, or like Gianluca, a young boy with incredible presence. It is a show full of poetry and humanity, full of a rough and harsh sweetness, where Delbono talks to us about a world torn apart by conflicts between men but also marked by the desire for freedom. From this theatrical and cultural project - the meeting of such a group with the people of a place at war - Delbono draws inspiration to make a film where what happens on the journey is intertwined with what happens on stage. It is a non-linear story, where the actors and the people on the street live "a war where there is no boundary between internal war and war of the world".
Pippo Delbono, author, actor, director, was born in Varazze in 1959. In the 1980s he began studying dramatic art in a traditional school which he left following his meeting with Pepe Robledo, an Argentine actor from Libre Teatro Libre (a theater group active in South America in the 1970s that used collective creation as a means of expression and denunciation of the dictatorship in Argentina). Together they moved to Denmark and joined the Farfa group, directed by Iben Nagel Rasmussen, historical actress of the Odin Teatret and for Delbono an alternative path began in search of a new theatrical language. Delbono dedicates himself to the study of the principles of oriental theater which he deepens in subsequent stays in India, China and Bali, where the central focus is the actor's meticulous and rigorous work on the body and voice. In 1987 he created his first show, The Time of Assassins and in the same year he met Pina Bausch who invited him to participate in one of the works of her Wuppertaler Tanztheater. This extraordinary occasion marks a fundamental stage in the director's artistic career. Delbono's shows are not productions of theatrical texts but total creations, the actors are part of a nucleus that maintains and grows over time. Already in the first work the features of a unique theatrical lexicon are defined which represents the peculiarity of all subsequent creations.