Ali, Mahmoud and Mohamed are three Egyptian men who lived in Italy without documents for almost ten years. Suddenly thanks to an amnesty they finally manage to legalise their status and their future is re-inhabited by possibilities. As part of their need to rediscover their dreams and hopes, they decide to take the journey back to the first places of arrival, where they disembarked from the boats that had brought them as teenagers to Italy after crossing the Mediterranean. The film follows them back to the emblematic places of the past, where memories are intertwined with fantasies about what could be, or could have been, their possible new life. Collaborative documentary filmmaking is accompanied by creative narrative processes such as theatre, storytelling, photography and participatory animation.
Italian and Greek with a foot in England, Alexandra D’Onofrio is a visual anthropologist and a director. In the past few years she has been using documentary filmmaking, animation, theatre and storytelling as collaborative methods of research on the topics of migration. In her social and cultural work on the ground, she applied similar creative methods in order to create social contexts to foster new encounters and the sharing of stories, by co-founding in Milan the Fandema community theatre group, the Italian language school for newcomers Asnada, and the storytelling project on motherhood MAdRI. “It Was Tomorrow” is her last film produced as part of her PhD in “Anthropology, Media and Performance”
at the University of Manchester (UK).