Ugo Fiore has adapted and directed L’uomo che brucia, a production which, drawing inspiration from the novel L’Homme qui brûle by the French author Alban Lefranc, unfolds as a brutal and unrelenting plunge into an overheated mind.

In a familiar yet distorted city, terrorist attacks are no longer exceptional events, but rather a sort of daily weather report. The city centre has become an area reserved for young women, celebrating their youth and elegance to boost tourism. Meanwhile, the military hand out leaflets for a memorial signed by Banksy: #all*together*against*terrorism.
It is not a dystopian future, but our present taken to excess, to the point of caricature. Lefranc’s language reflects this drift: it shifts from hashtags to biblical verses, from political aphorisms to pornographic scenes, constantly disintegrating and reassembling itself.
In this scenario, we follow Luc, a writer obsessed with the Project: a total book, capable of containing everything. It is both refuge and paralysis, a boundless work that encompasses everything without giving anything back. Luc observes the catastrophe without acting, as if in front of a screen. Words lose their meaning, reality loses its substance. Even desire becomes a form of automatism: pornography becomes the grammar of the gaze, preventing any genuine encounter. This distortion also infects his bond with his childhood friend, one of the last remnants of affection, which transforms into an ambiguous web of projections, desire and loss.