- This is the story of 16-year-old Benedetta and a bizarre foster family. Benedetta is the mayor's daughter and will find her social role put to a test only to find out that she does not like it and that it makes her unhappy.
- "Only Beautiful Things" is a comedy film. It tells through unexpected meetings, contrasting relationships and bizarre characters how two worlds that are so far apart slowly end up getting to know each other and talking. It is the story of Benedetta, a popular sixteen-year-old girl, as she meets a bizarre family home that's just moved into her small town of Rimini. The "casa famiglia" is an unusual and noisy microcosm of socially excluded people: persons with severe disabilities, former prostitutes, former prisoners... Benedetta is the mayor's daughter. She is forced to confront her social role that - as she will find - she does not like. She leads us - through her love affair with Kevin, one of the guys in the house - into a world on the margins, where everyone seems "wrong" or "bad", but are they? "Only Beautiful Things" is the story of a transformation and an encounter with diversity - which at first causes diffidence, questions, fears - it's a turnaround moment and it actually creates a complete and beautiful existence. The roles of people with disabilities are interpreted by truly disabled people: the film comes from the world of the Community Pope John XXIII, and for this it represents its wealth and captures the most interesting and current aspects. STRUCTURE AND VISUAL TREATMENT "Only Beautiful Things" is first and foremost a comedy. With its light but profound tone, it gets to everyone who listens. It is fun and exciting and leaves a lasting impression as it speaks to each of us, our daily life, our friends, our children and the children of our friends. It does so with delicacy and respect, smiling but without neglecting or hiding anything, telling us that beauty is also hard work, that happiness is not always a gift and that sometimes through tears beautiful things have an even greater value. The film - from the very beginning - is inspired both by the great Italian comedy and by the vein of French comedy in the last 20 years: generous films that excite, make people laugh and reflect. A genre in which joy and sorrow, fun and sadness, chaos and reflection, comedy and bitterness, simplicity and complexity converge. The narrative is that of an adolescent girl and the direction is in tune with a youthful vision of these themes, dear both to the youth and to their older brothers, uncles and parents, in Italy and abroad as well. This is demonstrated by the enthusiasm that the film has aroused in anyone who has been a part of it, in professional terms or even just as a personal curiosity. From this point of view, during the writing of the screenplay, an experimental workshop was undertaken with the students of the Fellini art school in Riccione, to adapt the language of the protagonists to that of today's adolescents. The students were involved, as a sort of "consultants in the field", also in the preparation studio of the sets and costumes, so that they were consistently with the world of teenagers, and one of them was selected to work on the set as a runner. The applied photography, consciously unconventional and surprising, is particularly effective and adapts to the subjects through glimpses of movement and unusual framing, as unusual as the people in the story. Benedetta enters on tiptoes into the family home, like Alice in the White Rabbit's warren. Thanks to her curiosity and a desire to break patterns, typical features of adolescence, Benedetta goes against the taboos of an entire country. The purity of her gaze allows us to see the world of diversity and marginalization from an original point of view without prejudice. Those stories of the inhabitants of the house are of ones unconventional people, on the margins of society, whose real tears are often ignored. "Only Beautiful Things" in fact is a film-story that, with Benedetta, crosses a microcosm of people considered "different", "wrong", "defective","superfluous": the seriously disabled, the former prisoner, the unwelcome migrant victim of war, the former prostitute, the autistic boy. In the house there are characters with very obvious, sometimes tragic, humanity. They are the weak, the last in line, those that provoke us with their diversity. The family home is not just the territory of their humorous and tiring redemption, but also it becomes the theater of ours, where we learn to understand what really counts, where we stop seeing and begin to look, capturing the beauty of humanity. Benedetta takes us to this house and she invites us to touch the reality of those who live there, even of the two parents made more by love than biology. The film is therefore a mosaic of narratives, a chorus where it is easy to recognize oneself, a plurality of voices through which the social role of the family emerges as a place of welcome and beauty. Moreover, given the "particular" nature of some of the protagonists, during filiming certain scenes were simply allowed to emerge, that the reactions flowed spontaneously and that the emotions were authentic. This makes "Only Beautiful Things" a precious and rich film also from a human point of view, an event that in some respects is unrepeatable.
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