In 1943, Vincenzio and Maria take their children to his father's Tuscan farm. Vincenzio commutes to Rome where he's a physician and, in the hospital basement, prints an anti-Fascist paper. His brother is in the Resistance; his father supplies food to a local monastery where 12 fugitives hide. All is seen through the eyes of the oldest child, Paulo, who's about 7 and the only lad at school who doesn't wear a Fascist Youth uniform. For Paulo and his siblings, it's great fun playing with their nonno, finding herbs in the fields, watching a maid's tryst with a soldier, teasing a silent monk. Then the war reaches the farm when Italy surrenders and the Germans exact revenge.

The great oak tree of Scandiano, in the Reggio Emilia hills, is the silent witness of a long history, that of a territory shaped by nature and human activity. From the late Renaissance to the present, revolutions and traditions have alternated, leaving an uninterrupted flow of images imprinted in the memory of the centuries-old tree. Shot using a drone in a 15-minute sequence plan, The Great Oak is the result of a courageous technical challenge, but above all a conceptual one: to overturn the anthropocentric point of view of film narration and offer a more articulate perspective on reality, on the invisible links between living beings and on our role in the world.