Calcified broken bones, a pair of earrings, some bracelets, a pocket’s content. These are the kind of fragments of life that the anthropologist Doctor Cristina Cattaneo collects in order to identify the Pure Unknown, people who have been found dead and without an ID. Every year tens of Pure Unknown, of nameless bodies, arrive at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Milan wrapped up in a body bag or in a zinc container, and encounter the careful hands of Cristina and her research team, who try to discover their names and reunite them with their families.

However, when these bodies, or skeletons, clearly belong to those coming from the fringe of society, such as when they are illegal migrants died in the Mediterranean Sea, Cristina and her team’s work in taking care of them is often hindered. Nobody has any interest in spending money to find their names: none of the institutions, none of the governing bodies.

Nevertheless, while Cristina persists in searching for their identities to put together the broken pieces of their stories and their lives, she keeps on fighting to convince the European establishment and society that these forgotten bodies, no longer people, deserve to be identified.

This film is the story about her battle.