Penélope Cruz stars as Clara, a Spanish woman who has relocated to Rome in the early 1970s to raise a family with Felice (Vincenzo Amato), her emotionally distant and frequently absent husband. From their new apartment, Clara sees a city in transition, the remnants of an old society washed away by the tastes of an emerging middle class. Even though the paint is fresh, and the appliances are new, the crushing expectations around family, desire and gender remain as traditional as ever. Clara’s three children are likewise poised at a precipice, on the verge of adolescence and its myriad complications. Her eldest child, Adri (arresting newcomer Luana Giuliani), yearns for another life — an outsized, vibrantly-realized vision of a world where he simply gets to live as the boy he knows himself to be. Without an accepted vocabulary for talking about gender, Adri simply tells adults that he’s an alien from another galaxy.
An effortlessly moving film about growing up, fitting in and breaking the mold, L’IMMENSITÀ is as freewheeling and creative as its central characters, mixing genres and staging musical numbers out of thin air.
“A love letter to its characters and their real-life counterparts, the film is, above all, a witness to the kind of expansive love and kinship that is formed in the margins, but nonetheless expansive in its imaginings of the world.” —Sarah-Tai Black, Los Angeles Times “L’IMMENSITÀ, based on the director’s own life experience, is an honest and poignant portrait of a mother and child who feel alien in a world that doesn’t understand them. It’s an emotional journey of a child discovering his sexuality and the strength of a mother’s love that transcends time and place… Beautifully realized performances by Luana Giuliani and Penélope Cruz perfectly capture what it's like to feel alien in this world. The film embraces queerness in all its forms.” —Sara Clements, Next Best Picture
