Filmmaker Statement

As the daughter of a Sicilian father and a German mother, with their family-related and cultural identity, both beauty and struggle have fundamentally shaped how I see the world. I was fourteen when tensions between the German and Italian side of my family came to a crisis, and I stopped communicating with my paternal grandparents, who moved back to Sicily where my grandfather died twelve years later. It took me five years and moving to another continent to understand that my grandfather’s death and funeral had triggered an identity transformation, which would ultimately bring me back to my father’s hometown: Lentini. Mila, the protagonist, goes through experiences similar to my own when she is reunited with her Sicilian family. Her internal struggles, feeling torn between alienation and inclusiveness, the wish to communicate, the language barrier, and her own insecurity, is what inspired me to tell this story.