Artist, anarchist, drop-out, paperless immigrant: Giovanni Segantini was all of this. He created, usually under the open sky, monumental, idealized alpine landscapes. In the course of his lifetime, he climbed ever higher in search of more light, finally dying at 41 in an Engadin alpine hut at 2700m. The film offers insight into his difficult childhood and boyhood, shares his inner processes and crises as a painter, as well as his contradictory dealings with motherly love and eroticism – and ultimately his desperate struggle against death…