Life is stubborn, and Vera knows it well. When she discovers that she is ill again (with the same disease that took away her mother, and many women in her family), her father Zeno offers her hospitality in the house where he has lived alone for years – the “Settimana Enigmistica” always on the windowsill of the bathroom, with the boxes filled at random, because the gaps are unbearable. Theirs is a incomplete but vital, witty, disruptive family. Nora is her younger sister, she manages a ten-year-old daughter alone and a bag shop where she tried to get Vera to work, but she was at the computer writing instead of entering invoices. In fact, Vera has always pursued, in addition to freedom, the dream of becoming a writer: however “stories must also be finished telling”, not leaving them half-finished, bogged down, a bit like her life. Her bumpy love with Franco – who manages to have a panic attack while accompanying her to a check-up – is not the safe anchor to face the new storm. Better to return to the house where she grew up, to that stubborn father of hers, than to go around only in torn canvas shoes to avoid having a doctor see her throbbing leg. And it is precisely in a locked room of that house that Vera discovers dozens of notebooks full of words: did her father write a novel? But if she has fifth grade. Who knows if it is the stories that save us, or if we are the ones who have to save them.
31 Gen 2024