Who knows what my friend Francesco and his colleague Paolo were thinking when they set out, almost for fun, to make this film. To tell this story. Who knows if they ever imagined how, little by little, this story would so consume them, as it shifted between before and after, north and south in a course that no longer had (as if it ever did) just one direction. Who knows, I ask myself today, before these images and timeless notes, if they, just as I, little by little, realised that this enchanting fable of our childhoods was still alive and "still important". And what's more: that it could still truly possess us!

Since I cannot speak for Francesco and Paolo, I will speak just for myself.
It is difficult to describe what a child of 8 or 10 felt towards the end of the seventies as he listened to the music of the Inti-Illimani. Difficult even for me, who was that child. Since then, so much has happened. Too much to remember what I liked so much about the music then, or that world that – dreaming – I saw behind it. But I did like it. So much so that I wanted to listen to it... and listen to it again and again...
It is difficult too – but a little less so – to say why in 2001 I felt the urge to "steal" some of Inti-Illimani's most beautiful notes to build a base for what very soon became one of my most "important" compositions, that is, "Il mio nemico". This gave me the incredible chance of meeting them, and started a collaboration that has grown ever more intense and fruitful over the years. Right up to this film, one that expresses the very soul, even more than the story, of a dream. A dream that was born one day to show the path, to recover an identity, and bear a message of hope. And in the end, so many paths were found, just as identities, and hopes. This is the reason – or one of the reasons – why the film did not want to follow a logical or chronological development, nor could it. And thank goodness. This music is not set in any other time than its own. And so, each phase is a return and a beginning, every song is a flight suspended between the new and the ancient.

Something that I do know now, however, and that perhaps I felt instinctively even as a child, is that the Inti are like a train that set out more than forty years ago and that has never stopped since. Even when history and time tried to, the train did not stop, not only thanks to its admirable force and conviction, but above all because an entire world wanted, and wants, that train to keep going.
Over the years, some carriages of the train have been lost, others added. And other trains have sprung from its ribs. Only naturally, for such a long and glorious run, from the revolutionary that its locomotive was, it became a sage. It does not try to hide the marks or banners of its long and laborious journey, yet it is still the bearer of the dreams that are the strongest, greatest, most courageous.
When you come onboard and are enveloped by that ancient music, looking out the window means realising that the world around us, somewhere, sometime, must have taken the wrong tunnel.
The right journey is still here, on this train. So get your ticket, and settle back in the coach.

Daniele Silvestri