Antonio Gramsci was born in a small town in Sardinia in 1891, into a family that poverty and a judicial scandal dragged into misery. He grew up with a deformed spine, was taken out of school at age eleven to carry registry books in a tax office, and arrived in Turin without a winter coat, with a scholarship that barely covered the rent. He died forty-six years later in a clinic room guarded by carabinieri, toothless, weighing little more than a child, two days after receiving the document that finally declared him free. Between these two points lies one of the most impressive intellectual trajectories of the twentieth century.

In this comprehensive biographical documentary, we reconstruct in ten parts the life of the journalist, political leader, and thinker who became the most translated Italian author since Machiavelli. We follow his upbringing in a Sardinia marked by rural poverty, the years of hunger and illness as a linguistics student in Italy's industrial capital, his discovery of socialism, the founding of the newspaper The New Order, and the extraordinary episode of September 1920, when 400,000 workers occupied the country's factories and kept production running without bosses.
The episode also follows the split in Livorno and the birth of the Italian Communist Party in an abandoned theater in the rain, the trip to Moscow and the meeting with the Schucht family, the marriage to the violinist Giulia, the time spent in Vienna, his term as a deputy amidst the terror of the Matteotti affair, the only speech Gramsci delivered in the Italian parliament before Mussolini himself, and his imprisonment in November 1926.
The second half of the narrative enters the prison. The makeshift school on the island of Ustica, where common and political prisoners studied side by side. The great trial of nineteen twenty-eight and the prosecutor's phrase that went down in history: we need to prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years. And, finally, the thirty-three notebooks written in tiny handwriting in a cell in Apulia, about two thousand eight hundred pages that gave the world concepts that are now inescapable in the human sciences, such as hegemony, passive revolution, organic intellectuals, civil society, war of position, modern prince and subaltern classes.
This is a work of historical dissemination, produced for strictly educational and informative purposes. Controversial episodes from Gramsci's biography, such as the origin of his physical deformity, the interception of his letter to the Soviet Central Committee, the degree of his isolation within the prison and the editorial history of the Prison Notebooks themselves, are presented here with the different existing versions, without the video taking sides with any of them. The same criterion applies to the Brazilian reception of his work, which includes profoundly divergent readings that are presented side by side, leaving it to the viewer to form their own opinion.

An episode for those interested in twentieth-century history, Italian history, the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe, the history of political ideas, and the biographies of figures who transformed the way we think about culture, education, and power.
Script, research, and narration: Rafael Cerqueira.

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