The story starts at the point in Benito Mussolini's life when, at the age of nineteen, he gave up being a schoolmaster, left his home town of Forli and, as a guest worker on a building-site in Lausanne, Switzerland, underwent his own personal experience of the darker sides of the capitalist system. The speed with which the rhetorically gifted demagogue manages to assemble whole crowds of friends and followers around him - including above all his "protectress", the enigmatic Russian woman Angelika - is reflected in the speed at which he succeeds in attracting enemies from church and state. His love for the beautiful Eleonora, the daughter of a middle-class family, studying medicine at the University of Geneva - a city where Mussolini himself has been carrying stone around as an unskilled worker - even convinces him to take up studying. When a fatal accident occurs on the building-site - a worker plunges to his death from a badly-secured section of scaffolding - the young student Mussolini calls for a general strike. Arrest and expulsion are the consequences of this first piece of agitation, and it is only the intervention of his influential friend Angelika which saves him from being thrown into jail. But Mussolini is not a man to give up easily. Soon he's successful again, in Trieste, working as editor of the socialist newspaper "L'Avventure del Lavoratore", and a conflict soon arises between himself and the local clergy. This, however, provides the local imperial Austrian authorities with the excuse they need to expel this troublemaker and agitator from the country. Back in his native town of Forl

release year: 1993

star(s): Antonio Banderas