Emanuele Casati

Alessandra and Elisa are fifteen, bound by an intense connection that shifts between closeness, desire, and subtle jealousy. Elisa is about to move abroad, and the looming distance charges every gesture with new weight. They tease, provoke, and cling to each other, as if holding on and pushing away were the same thing. What they can’t express surfaces in silences, in glances, in the fragile balance between them. Over the course of a long afternoon, following the path of a river, they drift along the edges of their world: boys who bully, men who blur boundaries, glimpses of an adult world they observe without fully understanding. In that uncertain space - shaped by fear, confusion, and desire - something cracks. An extreme act begins to take shape, driven by something deep, unspoken, and unresolved.

The true story, little known until now, of Elena Colombo, a Jewish girl from Turin who, in 1943, was separated from her parents at the age of 10 and deported alone to Auschwitz: the only documented case in the entire Italian Shoah. The story is told through the eyes of two young protagonists, Cecilia and Fabrizio, who live in Turin today and reconstruct the story of Elena and her parents from an old family photograph...