"La Mal'Ombra" tells the story of a village in Northern Italy: San Pietro di Rosà, in the province of Vicenza. This film is a documentary on the tension between industrial development and the quality of life. A film on the difficulty of dialogue between politics and citizens, and on the silent and not always transparent alliances between politics and economic powers. In 2002 in San Pietro, a village with little more than a thousand inhabitants, the Local Government decided to allow the building of one of the largest zinc foundries in Italy. A Protest Encampment rose against this decision: a small white tent is set up in front of the enormous yellow building. It is full of citizens, not members of militant ecological movements or radical left minorities: they live in the houses overshadowed by the foundry, finding themselves cut off from an agricultural heritage totally sold out to the private interests by entrepreneurial clans and their political patrons. "La Mal'Ombra" chronicles, with the immediate, ironic, and cutting language of the documentary film, a crucial year in the fight of the citizens of San Pietro - the period between May 2006 and June 2007: from the day in which the local authorities granted permission for the foundry to begin work until the two weeks prior to the local administrative elections, during which the contest was fought between the outgoing mayor, supported by the foundry and the regional entrepreneurial network, and the civic list supported by the encampment.