Laura Riccioli

Is the Monster - a serial killer - at work again in Bolzano? Discredited cop Paolo and inexperienced assistant prosecutor Eva must find out.

Moderation, set in Egypt, Greece and Italy, revolves around a female horror director (Maya Lubinsky) and a screenwriter (Anna De Filippi), whose latest collaboration is haunted by encounters with its 'raw material' and the escalation of conflicting desires. Faced with the disintegration of their project, the director becomes more and more drawn into conversations with the actors she has cast (Aida El Kashef, Michele Valley and Giovanni Lombardo Radice), which reflect on the way horror traverses the affective and material realities of their lives on and off screen.

A summer evening twenty-five years ago: the city is deserted, the final of the FIFA World Cup is underway. A woman, Teresa, comes down to the Tiber and lets herself be carried away by its current. She is swallowed by the river and her daughter Virginia crosses Rome in the dark of the night: she wants to find her and save her. Virginia has to make her way through the depths of the waters, of the history, myths, calamities and gleams of life of a timeless Rome. And so she is able to see again her mother, who emerges from the darkness of the Tiber to fly toward AMOR, “the planet of care” surrounded by water where the streets, squares and fountains remind her of Rome and animals are free to wander around.

Eli has four children, an unemployed husband and a job with an almost impossible commute. Vale is single and makes ends meet by working in clubs as a dancer. Tied by a profound emotional bond of true sisterhood, the two women's lives are two sides of the same coin, but their mutual solidarity isn’t always enough to lighten the load of their difficult circumstances.

Is the Monster - a serial killer - at work again in Bolzano? Discredited cop Paolo and inexperienced assistant prosecutor Eva must find out.