17/10/2025 - Riccardo Milani’s comedy tells the true story of a Sardinian shepherd who makes a stand against the plans of a ruthless property developer, reminding us that money can’t buy everything

Virginia Raffaele and Giuseppe Ignazio Loi in Life Goes This Way

On one side, there’s a white-sand beach with crystal-clear water and cows grazing in the dunes. On the other, there’s a meeting room with a view of the Duomo in concrete-clad Milan. Here, there’s a ruthless real estate guru who wants to build a luxury resort on an untouched stretch of Sardinian coastline; there, a shepherd who isn’t willing for all the money in the world to sell his family’s land to make room for the bulldozers. It’s on this dual track that Life Goes This Way advances, a new film by Riccardo Milani (responsible for the box office hit Like A Cat on a Highway [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) which has been chosen as the opening film - screening out of competition - of the 20th Rome Film Fest, before it hits Italian cinemas on 23 October via Medusa Film and PiperFilm. It’s a social comedy set in a harsh context, reminding us that money can’t buy everything, and exploring identity, dignity and protection of the environment.

Based on a true story and scripted by the director in league with Michele Astori (collaborating with Milani for the third time after Grazie ragazzi [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Un mondo a parte [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), Life Goes This Way begins at the turn of the new millennium, when Giacomo (Diego Abatantuono), who’s the chair of a powerful Milanese property development company, tells his associates that he has his eyes on a paradisiacal beach in southern Sardinia for building a five-star resort. Knowing that the project will bring tourists, work and money for everyone to that stretch of coastline, Giacomo believes that convincing the last remaining shepherd to give up his land (his fellow villagers have already sold up) will be a walk in the park. “Efisio Mulas won’t ever be a problem”, one of his colleagues confirms. The sum they offer him is considerable: they’re talking hundreds of thousands of euros. But even when the offer reaches the several million euros mark, after years of negotiations the answer given by Efisio (played by real 84-year-old Sardinian shepherd Giuseppe Ignazio Loi) never changes: no, this is my home, I’m not selling.

Determined to change his mind are building site manager Mariano (Aldo Baglio), who’s sent to negotiate with Efisio, and the entire local community, who form an orderly queue outside the elderly shepherd’s door (in one of the film’s most entertaining moments) to plead with him to think again: in a village where there’s no work, the resort could change everyone’s lives. Standing alongside Efisio is his daughter, Francesca (Virginia Raffaele, previously the protagonist of Un mondo a parte, now grappling with the Sardinian dialect), who’s torn between the prospect of a more prosperous future and her attachment to her land.

Life Goes This Way is a story about a Sardinian shepherd against the world, but it’s also about a fractured community which is conflicted over the need to work and the need to protect the land, and in which some members are sadly pitted against the others. The State is all but absent, the local authorities bend easily, and justice takes the form of a judge (Geppi Cucciari, who only makes a swift but significant appearance) who has been born and raised in the area and who ultimately does the right thing. But in its nigh-on two-hour running time, the film becomes repetitive, despite the plot unfolding over a ten-year period the characters and settings remain pretty much the same, and attempts at comedy (courtesy of Baglio) sometimes clash with the context. They’re fairly trivial flaws but you don’t expect them from a director of Milani’s calibre, who’s now on his 16th feature film.

Life Goes This Way is an Ourfilms and Wildside production made in association with PiperFilm and Medusa Film. World sales are entrusted to PiperPlay.

(Translated from Italian)