Show Me Once
SHOW ME ONCE
Documentary — 90 min — 2027
| Genre | Documentary / investigative essay |
| Runtime | 90 min |
| Director | Aurora Volcan |
| Written by | Michele Melani |
| Executive Producers | Michele Melani & Gottardo Giatti |
| Production | Formasette |
| Country | Italy |
| Languages | Italian, German, English, Mandarin |
| Status | In development — principal photography September 2026 |
LOGLINE
In those years, there were still Olympics for human hands.
A record made in 2026 for those born after: the chronicle of the exact moment machines learned to do with their hands what had cost humans centuries to learn.
SYNOPSIS
In September 2026, in Shanghai, more than a thousand young people from sixty countries compete using their hands. In the same city, in the same days, machines learn a trade by watching a gesture for four seconds.
Show Me Once travels through alpine workshops, marble quarries, thousand-year-old porcelain factories and robotics labs to record the moment manual work stops being necessary. It is not a film about a craft disappearing. It is a document about who owns a gesture, once the gesture becomes data.
LONG SYNOPSIS
A trade was learned by standing next to someone who already knew it. It took years, and in the end that knowledge was written down nowhere: it lived in the fingers.
Show Me Once is the chronicle of the moment this stopped being true. The film moves between a joinery workshop in a Dolomite valley, the Roman quarries of Carrara where robotic arms now carve the marble, a Chinese city that has been making porcelain for more than a thousand years and where three metres of road separate the old craftsmen from the machines that glaze in their place, the Swiss laboratories where hands are designed that no longer have a human shape, and the factories where robots take part in building other robots.
In the middle of it, in Shanghai, the world championship of skilled trades brings the human gesture to the highest degree of precision it can reach.
The documentary does not ask whether craft will survive. It asks who a gesture will belong to once the gesture has become a file — and it shows the people living through that passage right now: those who know how to make things, those who taught without knowing it, those who build the machines, those who bought them, those who have already lost.
All of this is told by a voice speaking in the past tense over images shot in the present. Only at the end do you understand who is speaking.
WHERE WE SHOOT
ALTO ADIGE
A joinery workshop in a Dolomite valley, where a trade is still handed over one gesture at a time.
CARRARA
Roman quarries, where robotic arms now cut the marble.
SHANGHAI
The world championship of skilled trades: a thousand young people from sixty countries, competing with their hands.
JINGDEZHEN
A thousand years of porcelain, and three metres of road between the old craftsmen and the machines that glaze in their place.
LAUSANNE
Laboratories where hands are designed that no longer have a human shape.
CONTACT
Festival submissions, co-production and press enquiries:
info@formasette.com
Formasette — Bolzano, Italy