The Tale of an Artist's Brush (2008)

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In a small Italian mountain village, poet and script writer Tonino Guerra is sitting talking about artists’ brushes. During the Second World War he was captured and put in a concentration camp after having fed a cat.
With death snapping at his heals, he starts writing poems in Romagnolo, the local dialect of his native district. Miraculously he survives, publishes his writings, becomes a poet and sends the collection of poems to the artist Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964).
The painter Morandi likes Guerra's poems and sends a letter to the poet. Guerra wants too see artist's studio and travels to Morandi to have a look at it. But the artist doesn't want to show his studio to Guerra and the poet returns mission unaccomplished.
It is winter and lead-grey rain clouds pass over him. Several months later the artist lets the poet into his studio, which turns out to be a microcosm of dust, associations and terracotta pots filled with brushes.
When the poet wants to help the painter throw away some worn-out brushes - bald like old people - the artist responds heatedly and explains that a brush has life because of all the paintings that it has created. One can’t just throw them away like something worthless, they have been your friends, the painter explains.
The poet Guerra then witnesses an odd ritual for the worn-out brushes and he understands that all good relationships are about love. But before the brush paints what it sees, its other half, the sheet of paper, goes through the whole spectrum of life in a concrete and physical way. It is soiled by earth, undone by water, dried in the wind in order to burn in heaven.