Sole

Teenagers Ermanno (Claudio Segaluscio) and Lena (Sandra Drzymalska) are all but strangers. He is an Italian boy who prefers the company of gambling machines to people in his seaside town. She is a precocious Polish girl who dreams of a better life abroad. Products of their surroundings, they lack the opportunity to fully express themselves.

Ermanno is paid by his uncle Fabio (Bruno Buzzi) to guard Lena, with whom he is thrust into intimate living quarters as she prepares to birth a child destined to be sold to Fabio and his wife Bianca (Barbara Ronchi) as part of an elaborate adoption scheme. However, as surrogate motherhood is forbidden by Italian law, Ermanno must first pretend to be the expectant father, buzzing between appointments with anticipation.

When a baby girl named Sole is born prematurely, Lena and Ermanno assume parental duties. Unexpectedly, they experience family life together and each begins to see the other in a different light.

In Sole, his first feature, director Carlo Sironi illustrates this powerful bond with impeccable visual economy, boldness, and lucidity. Inspired by ordinary people facing extraordinary situations, Sironi explores the power of unspoken desires and the force of human capability in a time where issues of borders and migration are especially volatile.

Evocative and transcendental, yet rooted in its own unique brand of stylized realism, Sole eclipses the boundaries of duty and circumstance.

DOROTA LECH