They built a country from the dark.

Told entirely in Italian through testimony, archives, and records, Buried (Sotto Terra) uncovers the hidden history of Italian miners who came to Canada to survive, as they descended into the nation’s mines and left behind a legacy of sacrifice, illness, and resilience that still haunts the towns they helped build.

Buried is a haunting, one-hour Italian-language documentary that gives voice to men whose history has often been left underground. In the mid-20th century, Italian workers arrived in Canada not in search of glory but of a paycheque that could keep families alive. Their destinations were the country’s hardest places: the nickel mines around Sudbury, the coal seams of British Columbia, and the asbestos fields of Quebec. What they found below was a world of danger, crushing isolation, and slow violence, the kind that settles in lungs, bones, and marriages.

Built from Italian testimonies, family archives, union letters, and cemetery records, the film pieces together a buried map of suffering and resistance: men who worked sick, fought for dignity, clung to faith, and survived through bonds forged in song, prayer, and shared fear. Buried is both an elegy and a reckoning, a portrait of the unseen labor that helped build modern Canada, and a reminder that some national histories are written not in monuments but in dust, silence, and the names carved into stone.