Over the last few years the production of multimedia content has experienced a rapid growth. Such data constitutes a valuable source of information, but to leverage that great potential, automating human processes is crucial. A good portion of multimedia data is represented by video data. From social media and streaming services to security, videos constitute one of the most immediate mediums to convey information. Combining the great expressivity of written text with vision is the foundation of Vision-Language understanding, often employed to perform automatic supervision, moderation and anomaly detection. The Thesis goes in this direction, investigating different solutions for an application capable of performing retrieval and detection on a video, starting from a textual description of the desired scene.