Catenaria finalist at the AI Film Awards Venice 2026

Rome, 1943. Piero, a young telephone lineman, and Luciana, a Jewish girl living in hiding, have built a secret: a clandestine line clipped to the cables of Rome's air-raid siren network, running across the rooftops of the occupied city.

The film is built on a documented historical infrastructure. Between 1940 and 1942, Rome installed 54 air-raid sirens on its rooftops, connected by kilometres of suspended cables. The network remained active until 1975. Many of those cables are still there.

Historical research shaped every element of the story: the technical language of the linemen, the geography of the occupation, the specific vulnerability of Jewish families in Rome in the autumn of 1943.

Catenaria is a short film and, at the same time, the proof of concept for a feature film in active development. The short tells the third act. The feature will tell the whole story.