In 1982, while shooting a photographic reportage in Naples, Patrick Zachman becomes friend with Andrea Mormile, a policeman from the special anti-camorra unit freshly created, who will be assassinated a little after Zachmann’s return to Paris. Thirty-five years later, Mormile’s grandson, a photographer himself, gets onto the tracks of Zachmann’s work and onto the images documenting the grandfather he never met.

Because of that, Zachmann’s decides to come back to Naples in a time of crisis for him concerning the meaning of photography itself; that reportage had kicked off the long and prestigious career of a then young Parisian photoreporter. How to reinvent oneself? How to find the right distance? How to document a world already overflowing with images? How to come up with new forms to talk about it?

During meetings with Andrea Mormile’s family, to his own amazement Zachmann realises that, by showing them printed photos portraying a man who once was a husband, a father and a grandfather to them, he is giving back to Mormile’s loved ones the images missing from their history, so they can use them to fill the gaps in their memory. That is, he’s giving back to them “a piece of dad” (“Un pezzo di papà”], the piece that was missing. Such a realisation reawakens and rekindles Zachmann’s love for photography that he thought he had lost forever.