Particle physicists are now heading toward the wide open and unmapped field of the “unknown unknowns”. No “wowing effect”, maybe for generations. Almost Nothing observes a scientific community at work, speaking the same discreet language of experimental research.

Director's note
Science is the wide open field where logic connects with philosophy, mathematics collides with politics, geometry gets rid of experience and computing can bring us into the exciting territories of the unknown. Science fiction films are the western movies of our generation.
When ZimmerFrei filmmakers group entered CERN for the first time we discovered a universe that looked very normal at first sight, an industrial city and a big campus animated with people of every sort and age, a general sense of understatement and open-minded courtesy informing human interactions, so different from the conflictive environment to which we are used to in our cities. CERN citadel looks like a social and human experiment in itself, where the collaboration and integration model has to be tested and reaffirmed day after day. Somehow the image of an utopian village came to our mind. Anybody working at CERN is very proud to underline its multi-cultural nature, its antimilitarist foundation in the aftermath of the early fifties, its particular form of coopetition (collaboration&competition), the horizontal meritocracy, and the inherent culture of gender and religion diversity. Are these statements a mere wish or an established matter of fact? Our film confronts this optimism and sincere sense of loyalty with the extreme high pressure of the working context and a sort of melancholia unintentionally leaking out in some moments of silence, some hesitations or the peculiar shyness of very competent people used to express themselves in a different language.
Almost Nothing observes the daily life of a community as an organism where the life of each individual is interwoven with the development of science, harsh and cruel judgement of the community of peers, ever-changing political framework, constant struggle against the attempts of private interests, misunderstanding of media and economic constraints.
It is a choral film about a scientific community speaking the discreet language of experimental research, facing daily life challenges and trying to resist the assaults of the ruthless show-biz world we created ourselves.
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