Umberto Eco - A Library of the World

Umberto Eco’s private library was a world in itself: more than 30,000 contemporary books and 1,500 rare and antique volumes. The director had worked with Eco one year before the writer’s death on a video project for the Venice Art Biennale in 2015, gaining access to the library. With the help of Eco’s family he has now produced a documentary that describes a one-of-a-kind place, but also tries to catch and represent the universal idea of a library as “memory of the world”, as Eco himself liked to describe it. Obviously, the film is also about the library’s owner. Through original interviews never seen before and rarely shown footage, it documents Eco’s ideas on memory and internet, literature and storytelling, truth and fakes and on the paranoia of the universal plot as described in Foucault’s Pendulum