an italian movie, by Maurizio Zaccaro based on a novel by the Austrian author Adalbert Stifter......
Kalkstein has been in competition at the 49th Venice Film Festival, the Montreal International Festival, the Goteborg International Festival and the Annecy International Festival; with this film, Zaccaro won the Grolla d’Oro 1992 award for best screenplay, the Targa Anec award for best director and the San Fedele Award for best film of 1993
Years after the fact, a surveyor tells a story to his friends over dinner about an experience he had while surveying a remote mountain site: The terrain there is forbidding, and a storm comes up, so the surveyor seeks shelter in the first place he can find it. This turns out to be the home of a poor, hard-working and very honest old priest. The surveyor shares a very spartan dinner with the welcoming old man, and the two strike up quite a bond of friendship. He discovers just one incongruity in this frugal setting: all the old man's bedding is of the highest quality. Time passes, and during an illness, the priest explains that the unusually elegant bedding comes from his having grown up in a wealthy family which has long since grown bankrupt. As failings go, if that is what this is, it seems minor enough. Realizing that he is dying, the priest entrusts the surveyor with his will. Later, when the will is read, it comes out that the priest wanted all his savings to go to the building of a school for the poor children of the region. In fact, the priest didn't have any monetary savings: his coin was of another kind. In an auction, the rich people of the area purchase each of the kindly priest's belongings for quite large sums of money, thus endowing the school.
with director Maurizio Zaccaro and late Aleksander Bardini
