CArbonia, late 1980s. The city that grew up around the coal mines is experiencing a rude awakening: the mines that for decades provided jobs and a sense of identity to an entire community are now a distant memory, and in their place remain unemployment, urban decay, and a widespread sense of abandonment. It is in this post-industrial Sardinia that Caterina and Cinzia, sixteen-year-old inseparable friends united by a passion for volleyball, try to imagine a future different from the one their homeland seems to have already mapped out for them.
Caterina has a strong personality but hides a fragility: she dreams of escaping a reality that suffocates her. The mining crisis has devastated her family: her father, a former miner, is a shadow of the man he once was; her mother works far from home just to make ends meet. Cinzia shares her desire to escape, her hunger for a different life. The two girls thus slip into a dangerous world, suspended between illegality and a desperate search for autonomy, becoming increasingly trapped in a web from which it seems impossible to break free: the film follows their emotional and moral journey, alternating moments of intimate complicity with the harshness of the choices they face, until the tragic conclusion that overwhelms them.
Loosely based on the never-fully-resolved story of Gisella Orrù, *Stelle nel Pozzo* is a tale of friendship and the struggle for dignity in a context of marginalization. Through the stories of Caterina and Cinzia, the film offers a glimpse into