Earlier this year, I went to see the Royal Academy's blockbuster Hockney exhibition, where every gallery was hung with his depictions of East Yorkshire, a forgotten, ignored region, but not deliberately, this is not Chernobyl. The ignorance is different; it's a driven through, passed by area, neither A nor B, it's the bit in between. Glanced as a blur, without the courtesy of being looked at.

Hockney turned that on it's head, and as the alchemist a good artist really is, transformed this underprivileged, overlooked region, and drew out poetry, magic, passion, colour. Cinderella has finally gone to the ball. That ugly duckling? It was a swan all along. We just did n't see it until Hockney drenched it with nectar. It shook it's feathers and our eyes opened.

That's more or less the same transmutation that Rocco Papaleo, the director of Basilicata coast to coast, managed to do for his home territory, Basilicata; another area just as unheeded, as forgotten as Hockney's East Yorkshire. If ever there were two orphans, then here they are, rendered invisible in the public consciousness, by the shouts and clamors of more excitable neighbours.

Papaleo's film, which warmed my heart to it's very last cockle when I saw it last night, as it did for the friend I was with, draws out the the unexpected beauty of this spectacular area like fine gold wire. I was riveted. Nearly every frame is a burst of intense colour, stark contours and rolling, deep horizons.

And the plot, well, there's more than a hint of East Yorkshire poking through,with all the character's shared secrets, unacknowledged fears, heartfelt dreams as they trundle for 10 days across Basilicata en route to a music festival, evoked for me the sometime bitter sweet, yet always genial camaraderie of Last of the Summer Wine. The circle squared in a sense.