It is a millenary practice, a little in all world cultures, to make a sacrifice when one begins to build a building, especially if of importance . Something in the foundation wall symbolic, a venial or affective value, is a very common apotropaic rite, a ritual born from the will to seize the favor of the gods of the place and remained all today an auspicious ceremonial.

Often confined to symbols and objects, in some periods and cultures, this superstition takes on extreme connotations and there are hundreds of them documented cases of men, women and children, walled alive, many of them also in Europe.

From Germany in fact this is the story of a medieval fortress, whose the wall was erected but collapsed several times. Then it was decided to buy one little girl with a single desperate mother, and to wall her up alive. This story wants, that the agreement was made with the mother to leave, for the child, a minimum crack in the wall, under which the mother continued to return, taken to madness by remorse. One morning the mother was found dead there before, for having split her head against the wall and, always the same story, that this blood stain deeply soaked the stone, so as to remain red over time.

original story

Thomas Perathoner

Script

Thomas Perathoner

Movietype

full lenght featured film