L’Immensita

Director: Emanuele Crialese, Cast: Penelope Cruz, Vincenzo Amato, Luana Giuliani, Official Selection 2023 Sundance Film Festival, Italian with English subtitles, NR

Rome in the 1970s is a world which straddles new neighborhoods being created, TV variety shows still in black & white, societal advances and family models that now seem outdated. Clara and Felice have just moved into a new apartment. Their marriage has reached a point of no return: they no longer love each other, but they can’t seem to leave each other either. Their children are the only thing that keeps them together, the same children that are the syphon for all of Clara’s dreams of freedom. Adriana, the eldest, has just turned twelve; Clara’s mood swings and the growing tensions between her parents play out before her watchful gaze. Adriana is in a state of refusal of her name and her identity, and her dogged pursuit of trying to convince everyone that she is a boy brings the already fragile stability of her family to breaking point. As the children search around them for guidance—be it a voice from above or a song on the TV—everything changes, both inside and outside of themselves. “A love letter to its characters and their real-life counterparts, the film is, above all, a witness to the kind of expansive love and kinship that is formed in the margins but nonetheless expansive in its imaginings of the world.” —LA Times