The film stars disabled actors and professional performers. It tells a story of disability without sentimentality or melodrama—one that understands itself not through diagnosis but through emotion, affection, and love; everything that transforms a collection of cells into a person.
The film's strongest thread, and the spine of its plot, is the chance encounter between a driven businessman chasing easy money and a resident of Rome's don Guanella Institute.
What begins as physical and moral distance becomes a journey that grows existential—a metaphor for losing yourself to find yourself. It's striking, though perhaps unsurprising, that every character who interacts with the protagonists carries hidden wounds of their own. The film seems to suggest that happiness needs no credentials; we grasp it instantly. But pain demands space, time, silence.
After various obstacles, both men discover something crucial: that fragility can be read as an opening rather than a closing, and that the bonds they've forged will outlast them. The dialogue sometimes cannot quite capture that simplicity which confounds the learned—it stays instead with a fragility that softens and moves us.
A bold attempt, and ultimately a success.
Marcella Potenza, 2017