“When I look at Rome, I see my mother,” confides Virginia Eleuteri Serpieri. We see her roaming the city in which, 25 years ago, her mother Teresa took her own life by jumping into the Tiber. Water is a recurring motif in this journey into the filmmaker’s memories and reflections. Equally free-flowing is the stream of imagery and associative thoughts, of old prints and family photographs, of myth and fantasy, and of documentary and re-enactment.
Intertwined with the director’s own struggle with this painful event, a second narrator gives a voice to Teresa, who was born in 1943, when the bombs were falling. More than 20 years later she found love, but her happiness was undermined by the snake pit of depression. Now Teresa tells us of how she ascended to the planet Amor after her death, where people care about each other. Her daughter presents this lighter world in bucolic and playful 8mm scenes.
The free-form style of Serpieri’s first feature-length film reflects her experience with shorter, experimental work. It's a creative evocation of a deep longing, ultimately returning to dwell on that one particular photograph.
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