The only Italian film chosen in the official competition of the 78th Locarno Film Festival is a first fictional feature. That of Valentina and Nicole Bertani, in which the two Lombard sisters find, in the second roles stressing the sweet strangeness of the story, homozygous twins with a slight mental impairment and who were the subjects of their documentary The shyness of the hairunveiled at the Venice Mostra in 2022. In The girlsthey tell the story of three girls of 8, 9 and 10 years old who will meet and make a group for a summer, in Ferrare, Emilie-Romagne, in the 1990s.
This is where Linda and her young mother Eva arrive from Ticino (the film was co -produced by the Cinédokké company and the RSI). Fleeing her own mother, a bourgeois having a moralizing look at her bohemian life and the way she raises her daughter, Eva is – we can quickly guess – a drift junkie. Like the young heroine of Children of Platzspitz (Pierre Monnard, 2020), a pre -adolescent man who was inventing a more joyful parallel world while trying to support her mother, Linda will do against bad fortune good heart, in particular by approaching Azzura and Marta, the girls of an anesthesiologist and a nurse leaving them great autonomy. Little enthusiastic to have left the comfortable villa of her grandmother for a shabby apartment, she will at least try to have fun.