Oceano

A young Polynesian, Tànai, leaves his rocky native island in a fragile canoe to perform a very ancient ritual: to procure some land to make the bread tree grow. Thanks to his profound knowledge of the sea, fruit of the teachings that every Polynesian father has passed on to his children for centuries, he sails across the ocean. He lands on Easter Island where he contemplates the stone idols carved by his ancestors. After a shipwreck, he is found by a Papoa tribe that holds him prisoner, waiting to immolate him to appease the local divinity. Having escaped with the help of a girl, he reaches a small island on which an elderly European lives as a hermit and helps him build a new canoe. The young man resumes his journey but is shipwrecked again this time on the coast of Alaska. He is found half-drowned by some American scientists. Healed and cured, Tànai faces the ocean again until he lands on his island that has been turned into a radioactive desert. Having rescued the inhabitants in a ‘modern’ place, an atomic bomb was detonated on the island. 

Special Prize 1971 International Taormina Film Festival.