An inclusive festival that knew how to tell our stories of fragility. Rome's 18th Film Festival wrapped on October 29th after two weeks of screenings, filmmaker conversations, and exhibitions. Beyond the major titles that captured the most attention, there were smaller gems worth discovering—films and series that handled difficult subjects with genuine care and honesty.
Consider Kripton by Francesco Munzi, which shows us what we still struggle to see: what happens inside our psychiatric facilities, where six young people choose to admit themselves to fight their own disorders. Or the miniseries All the Light We Cannot See, directed by Shawn Levy and Stephen Knight (the first episode screened on October 30th), arriving on Netflix November 2nd and adapted from Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Its protagonist, Marie-Laure LeBlanc (played by Aria Mia Loberti and Nell Sutton), is a blind French girl whose courage and hope stand as a counterweight to the violence and destruction of war.
These works deserve attention because they shatter taboos and expose prejudice. Then there are films that, while not centered on disability or fragility, invoke these themes nonetheless. Take Unfitting, a debut short by actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno: an autobiographical story, conceived by Silvia Grilli and starring Carolina Crescentini, about bullying directed at a woman in cinema who becomes a target of cruelty because of her weight and is nearly forced to abandon her work and her career. How many more times must we hear the demand to "hold in your stomach" or to live up to the glossy standards society imposes? It's a powerful indictment of an aesthetic tyranny that needs—and deserves—to be dismantled.
In Ginevra Elkann's Te l'avevo detto, there's Lucio, a limping dog who delivers an important lesson: everyone is unique in their own way, and forgetting that at the first sign of difficulty is a waste (Lucio loses the use of his legs, and the veterinarian pressures his owner to "replace" him with a dog that "can do everything"). Then comes Volare, directed by Margherita Buy in her debut, which lays bare a phobia close to her heart—the fear of flying—and shows us how important it can be to overcome our fears with help from others. Finally, there are the deeply vulnerable young people in Mare fuori 4, whose first hundred minutes screened to a packed house. These minors imprisoned in a Campania detention center are behind bars for varied reasons, but most often because they themselves are victims of a social and cultural context that sentenced them to a predetermined fate—one that, with the help of dedicated educators, can be overturned. "What matters is now, not the past," says educator Beppe (Vincenzo Ferrera) in this new season. Carmine Recano, who plays commander Massimo Esposito in the series, echoed similar sentiments on the red carpet: "Mare fuori means losing yourself to find yourself again, loving in order to love yourself." He's right. After all, no one is disposable. No one should be left alone.