When filmmaker Alex Bezeau begins looking into the life of his great-grandfather, Giovanni, he expects a straightforward genealogical investigation. Instead, he confronts a century-old wall of silence. His grandmother, Rita, harbours dark and painful trauma from her childhood—and a secret she swears to take to her grave, one that threatens to derail Alex’s quest. Presented as an artistic, grunge-styled cinematic fever dream, the film invites audiences directly inside Alex’s mind as he battles to reconstruct the past from a tangled web of family myth, memory, and deeply ingrained trauma.

Guided by incomplete military records and the fragmented, reluctant memories of his grandmother and her estranged brother, Alex embarks on a journey across Italy, culminating in the idyllic hilltop town of Atina, his family’s ancestral homeland. There, the romanticized veneer of the past shatters. Alex discovers that Giovanni wasn’t just a bystander; he enthusiastically answered Benito Mussolini’s every call, rising from militant youth fascist to soldier in the Royal Italian Army, and finally, one of the regime’s feared Blackshirts.

As Giovanni’s fascist past comes to light, Rita’s memories grow darker, revealing the devastating human cost of a life lived in service to the state. Mussolini’s Chicken is at once a warning of fascism’s slippery slope and a deeply human story of how an ordinary man answered Mussolini’s every call, at a devastating cost—leaving a legacy of trauma that would echo through generations.