“I can’t believe this country can unite artists, writers, intellectuals — even all the unionists — but we still have to worry Trump might win the election!” We’re in the thick of the campaign, just days away from the November 2024 US presidential vote, and the future president’s art of trolling and improvising remains infuriatingly incomprehensible to a combative Democratic activist despairingly clinging to Kamala Harris. She’s one of the people who appear in The Lunch - A Letter to America by Italy’s Gianluca Vassallo, unveiled in a world premiere within the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival’s Doc@PÖFF International Documentary Competition. 

The Lunch was shot during a 5,500-km journey across 11 states between 10 October and 9 November in 2024. In a brisk, segmented edit – managed by the director himself in league with Giulio Tiberti – the film opens in Coney Island, New York, before continuing in New York City. From there, the shoot heads west through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, then into West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, carrying on through Wisconsin and Iowa and farther west to Fort Pierre, South Dakota. It then loops back towards the Big Apple on a more northerly route, closing the circle at Coney Island. In short, a journey through the depths of this fractured, polarised and destabilised land. This circle ultimately brings together the doc’s two “protagonists” - Eduardo Hernandez, a Mexican cook at Coney Island’s Parkview Diner, and Robert Arnold Linsay, a MAGA Republican and political pundit - and explains the first half of the film’s title. The second half, A Letter to America, is a paradoxical and ill-considered reference to the title of a Linsay article celebrating Trump’s politics and Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem America, which the director plays over the end credits: “America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing…”

On the way to meeting Eduardo and Robert, we hear a number of short, interwoven stories, offering up faces and opinions which feed into the film’s overall vision. In the background, on television sets everywhere, which are invariably tuned into the campaign, we hear Trump talking about immigrants “raping our women”, about “keeping men out of women’s sports”, about fracking and the price of oil, about foreigners who “eat our dogs and cats”, and about Democratic voters with a “low IQ”. We meet a veteran from Chillicothe, Ohio; a Mexican mechanic from Seymour, Indiana; the chair of the Democratic Party in Peoria, Illinois; a Protestant pastor from Wisconsin; a scholar and activist from Iowa City; a cattle rancher in Iowa; the owners of a slaughterhouse in South Dakota; and a Jamaican truck driver who hauls meat.

Vassallo, who has two fiction features and two docs to his name, is also known as a photographer and visual artist, and his mise en scène approach results in a sensitive and evocative depiction of humankind — primarily immigrant workers — who are frightened at what might happen after the election (“this isn’t life,” Eduardo tells his friends). And on the other side, we discover an equally striking sense of fragility, in the form of the resentment and paranoia felt by those who don’t understand what’s happening, the anger of those who have nothing left to lose and of those who want to defend the little they have with guns (which they’re learning to shoot). The people who’ll be voting for Trump so he’ll control the price of eggs and send the foreigners home. Whitney George was also involved in the film as co-producer, and her sound design captures the many contradictions encountered en route. Given the serious democratic emergency we’re also experiencing in Europe, this documentary is a paragraph in the long story of how on earth we ended up here.

The Lunch - A Letter to America was produced by White Box Studio (Italy) in co-production with The Curiosity Cabinet (USA) and Percettiva (Italy), and was funded exclusively by private capital. The film will be released in Italian cinemas from January 2026, distributed by White Box Studio.