Francesco Turbanti

The lovely and talented Anna Foglietta (Perfect Strangers, The American) plays Simona; a single mother in her early ‘40s who is wholly devoted to her son, Filippo. To get over her insecurities as a parent and make her son happy on his eighth birthday, she decides to throw him a birthday party in their small flat and invite over his school friends and their parents. For Simona, this birthday is about to pose quite the surprising dilemma between allowing her son to embrace his true self and a mother’s fierce desire to protect her child from their potentially cruel surroundings. This is the last conundrum she was expecting to have to face on a day that is already rife with anxiety. Director Laura Chiossone turns their tiny flat into a melting pot and whilst the children play in the living room, the adults in the kitchen talk about parenthood, love, and different world views.

Summer 1943, Piedmont, Italy. Milton loves Fulvia who plays with his love: she only likes the depth of his thought and the letters he writes to her. One year later, Milton has joined the Resistance and fights beside other partisans. He learns during a conversation that Fulvia was secretly in love with his best friend Giorgio, a partisan like him. Milton decides to go find Giorgio in the Langhe region of Italy with all its misty hills...But Giorgio has just been arrested by the Fascists.

This is the story of 3 friends, destined to lose and find each other over and over again. More importantly, this is the (true) story of a film theatre in Florence, The Universale, which was a cultural landmark in the city between the '60s and the '80s. It was a theater of its own kind, bringing together intellectuals, students, as well as the people from San Frediano, a well-known working-class Quartiere. Such unusual mixture among the cinema-goers also produced a sort of creative chaos, which is explored through the eyes of Tommaso, the projectionist's son.

Here, the steel worker works on a continuous cycle, twenty-four hours a day and never stops. There, by the sea, on the island of Elba there is a paradise and the unreachable dream of happy families. In the middle, on the shores their secret beach, neither here nor there, Anna and Francesca, small but big, "thirteen years old almost fourteen", who are living their last summer of innocence before high school. The film is based on the book by Silvia Avallone.