My Bread and Butter follows the daily lives of a small group of former workers at the Honegger Cotton Mill in Albino for a winter, listening to three in particular: forty-year-old Lara Vezzoli and fifty-year-old twins Liliana and Giovanna Ghilardi, along with their colleagues Anania Zenoni and Lorenzo Signori.

It begins with the month-long protest in October 2012 that attracted the solidarity and bewilderment of the town and valley residents and forced the factory owner, Pietro Zambaiti, into a tense confrontation, but was unsuccessful in preventing the closure of the factory. It recounts what happens next: the wait for redundancy payments, zero-euro paychecks, a life reinvented and contracted around the lack of money and employment.

How do identities linked for generations to the certainty and nobility of work change? How do we build a way to get by anyway? What can we imagine—in a region where work has always been central—to fill that void? And finally, and most importantly: now that the bread has run out, how do we reinvent our lives?