The Cinque Terre of Italy, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that was virtually isolated for over a thousand years, now welcomes approximately three million tourists to its idyllic, coastal villages and vineyards each year.
Remarkable efforts to create sustainable ecology, environmental and historical preservation, and eco-tourism have been threatened in recent years by politics, corruption, greed, and an environmental disaster that largely destroyed two of the five villages in October, 2011.
This fragile territory's history is continually being shaped by ever-rising tourism amid massive, ongoing restoration efforts and the struggle for preservation vs. development in an already unstable landscape. A modern-day fight for sustainable tourism, cultural preservation, and environmental balance teeters on the edge of survival as the villages face an uncertainty marked by political change, natural disaster, and conflicting goals.
The documentary film VENDEMMIA explores the present day challenges of the Cinque Terre through both the eyes of its extraordinary residents and also those standing on the outside, anxiously observing the area's rapid-fire transformation as a new landscape emerges, and asks the essential question:
Is it possible to preserve the future without sacrificing the past?
