One of the Locarno Film Festival's finest strengths is its attention to every kind of audience—and its skill at building bridges between them. At Locarno 76, this happened through a natural convergence: the "Sustainability, Diversity and Inclusion" sector, which works to make the festival and its films accessible to all, partnered with Locarno Kids, the strand devoted to young people from childhood through adolescence. The result was a screening of Pascal Plisson's documentary We Have a Dream. The film has now reached Italian theaters, timed to the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
Plisson, a director with a consistent eye for social themes, follows Maud, a French teenager navigating adolescence: her relationship with her sister and friends, her studies, her passion for dance. In other words, an ordinary life—except that she lost one leg during childbirth and wears a hearing aid. But Maud asks herself a hard question: Do children and young people with disabilities in other parts of the world have the love and opportunities I've had? The film's answer comes through a journey across continents. We meet Nirmala and Khendo, two Nepali friends who need prosthetics to walk; Charles, a blind Kenyan runner; Xavier, a Rwandan boy whose albinism has made him visible since birth; and Antonio, adopted and raised with deep love by his Brazilian parents, who did not turn away from him when they learned of his autism.
Each story is uplifting, and they share two common threads: the unwavering affection and active support of family; and the essential role of education systems in preventing barriers and exclusion. This is why the film works so well for student audiences. Buildings and teachers matter—they are necessary—but true integration happens first among peers. Young people need to grow up comfortable alongside classmates facing mobility, sensory, or intellectual challenges unlike any they have known. Is the film comforting? Yes, because Plisson found stories that inspire. By filming how his subjects interact with others—conversation, laughter, embrace, shared experience—he reveals the joy of childhood available to each of them. The interviews with parents are equally illuminating: they show how these families hold together both the difficulty and the deep satisfaction of raising children with particular needs.
This is not a film that claims to capture a universal truth. It shows particular cases, worthy ones. Yet the mere fact that such lives exist—in places far from our own culture, sensibility, and social frameworks—is itself worth knowing and rarely acknowledged. Sadly, the film's Italian release was modest: only a few screens, for a few days, shown by courageous exhibitors (in Rome, the Cinema Farnese). The distributor Academy Two has wisely included We Have a Dream in the Circuito Cinema Scuole catalog. The hope is that it will find its true audience among students, carrying forward the journey that began months ago, so fittingly, with the young viewers of Locarno Kids.