Gli anni delle immagini perdute is the portrait of Valerio Zurlini, who died in October 1982, a few weeks after serving as a jury member at the 50th Venice Film Festival. Zurlini knew he was ill and had dedicated the last months of his life to writing his spiritual will, which would be released posthumously as Gli anni delle immagini perdute. It is a pitiless existential final account, the story of a world that has changed irredeemably, an anguished appeal in defence of auteur cinema. The director harks back to the most important events of his life, reveals the motivations behind his filmmaking and remembers the artists who shaped him. Above all he talks about the “Immagini Perdute” (lost images): the numerous films he wrote and prepared without managing to make them. Gli anni delle immagini perdute returns to the places where the director loved to retreat, it brings together the stories of friends and associates and contains a repertoire of interviews and conversations with the director in an attempt to understand the reasons for this enforced and fatal productive “silence”.