Marama Toyo – Il fuoco sulla cenere

As Europe marches towards war, a cosmopolitan seaman discovers an extreme sport in Australia and decides to bring it to Italy. Now a rider and an inventor, he challenges convention, power and the limits of mechanics to build an impossible motorcycle. But when History destroys his dream, he must face the hardest race of all: against fate and his own obsession with freedom.

Australia, the 1920s. Roberto Ivanicich, a multilingual naval officer impatient with every rule, discovers speedway: brakeless motorcycles sliding sideways around a dirt oval. He falls, gets up, laughs: he has found freedom. Old rider Jack O'Connell gives him a scarf against the cinders, and on the voyage home Marama Toyo is born.

In 1930s Fascist Italy, between hostile officials and tracks carved out of abandoned land, Marama brings speedway from Fiume to Trieste, Udine and Riccione. Following him is Elena Valli, a young photographer who wants to show an Italy different from the official one.

With Plinio Galbusera, a rigorous builder and his exact opposite, he chases an impossible idea: an eight-cylinder V, two-stroke, supercharged engine. Failures, an accident in the workshop, his first real crisis. Then the engine comes alive, and in 1938 the Galbusera 500 V8 astonishes the Milan Show. But Europe is on the eve of catastrophe, and Marama refuses to tie the dream to the regime's propaganda.

Interned in Australia as an enemy national, Marama finds the track again under guard and learns that freedom is worthless unless it is shared. In 1945 he returns to a country in ruins: the workshop destroyed, the V8 lost, Elena changed — and a boy, Nino, to whom he can pass on what remains. Until the last race, in Trieste, in 1946.

A feature film by

Swan Bergman

Original title

Marama Toyo – Il fuoco sulla cenere

International title

Marama Toyo – The Legend of Speedway and the Lost V8

Characters

Roberto Ivanicich “Marama Toyo” · Plinio Galbusera · Elena Valli · Jack O'Connell · Thomas Reed · Nino

Setting

Australia, Fiume, Trieste, Brescia, Milan — 1920s–1946

Release

Coming soon in theaters and digital

Produced by

NEW DESIGN MOVIE