Rosi's best known film tells of three brothers who, on learning of their mother's death, return to their ancestral farm in southern Italy. The eldest is a judge in Rome, prosecuting terrorists and constantly in fear for his life; the second, a teacher at a reform school in Naples; and the youngest, a factory worker in Turin. Each, in his way, has been sent out to suffer the "profound indifference to human life" that characterizes modern urban Italy. The night of the funeral, the men reconnect with each other and, amid flashbacks and dreams, with their lost sensibilities; reconnect with love. Visually, this extraordinary film fills space with emotion, capturing the eternal, comforting beauty of emptiness out-of-doors, in contrast to cavernous and hollow interiors. Three Brothers is "a celebration of tenderness and of a way of life that was austere but sustaining, and is gone beyond recovery." (Robert Hatch, The Nation)