As trans rights are being challenged in states all across this country, stories that bring their lives into full color are more important ever. L’immensità, Emanuele’s Crialese’s family drama starring Penelope Cruz and Luana Giuliani, is just such a film, and after appearances at Venice and Sundance, will be hitting theaters next month.
Crialese directed and co-wrote L’immensità, which centers on a family’s eldest child experiencing gender dysphoria while also navigating a chaotic home life and intolerance.
The film also stars Vincenzo Amato, Patrizio Francioni, Maria Chiara Gorett, Penelope Nieto Conti, and Alvia Reale.
L’immensità opens in NY and LA on May 12th.
Clara and her emotionally distant husband Felice relocate to Rome to raise a family. Even though the paint is fresh, and the appliances are new, the crushing expectations around marriage, desire, and gender in the early 1970s remain as traditional as ever. Their children Andrew, Gino, and Diana are likewise poised at a precipice, on the verge of adolescence, with nothing but their imaginations to defuse family tensions. The eldest child, Andrew (nicknamed Adri by his parents), yearns for another life – an outsized, vibrantly-realized vision of a world where he gets to live as the boy he knows himself to be. Without an accepted vocabulary for talking about his transgender identity, Andrew tells adults that he’s an alien from another galaxy and makes a habit of running away to pursue a local Roma girl who accepts his boyhood at face value. As an outsider ostracized for her own eccentricities, Clara instinctively strives to protect her son despite not fully understanding him. 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.
