11/07/2025 - Toplined by an eight-year-old child, Valentina and Nicole Bertani’s fiction feature debut is the only Italian film selected for the Swiss festival’s official competition

Mia Ferricelli, Agnese Scazza and Petra Scheggia in Le bambine

It’s 1997. Linda is eight years old and she doesn’t have many teeth, but she does have a filthy-rich grandma and a beautiful, dangerous and disruptive mother. It’s only when she meets two children her own age, sisters Azzurra and Marta, that she learns how to become a child. This is the heartbreaking story explored in Le bambine, Valentina and Nicole Bertani’s fiction feature debut, which is the only Italian movie (and co-production between Switzerland and France) battling it out in the official competition of the 78th Locarno Film Festival, unspooling between 6 and 16 August.

Valentina Bertani first turned heads in 2022 in Venice’s Giornate degli Autori line-up, with her surprising documentary The Crown Shyness [+see also:
trailer
interview: Valentina Bertani
film profile] (triumphant at the Nastri d’Argento Awards and nominated at the 2023 David di Donatellos) about two identical twin boys called Benji and Josh who are practicing Jews and musicians with an intellectual disability. Her fictional drama debut - co-directed with her sister Nicole and competing for the Golden Leopard - is, in the words of the festival’s artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro, a story exploring an issue which is often neglected (except by Truffaut, Bergman, Miyazaki and others, thankfully); namely, the way in which adults fail to see children in their own particular context, preferring to ignore their psychological richness and actual needs.

Written by the directors alongside Maria Sole Limodio, the film’s cast stars Mia Ferricelli, Agnese Scazza and Petra Scheggia in their first screen appearances, supported by Clara Tramontano (of the TV series The Lions of Sicily and also featuring in Carolina Cavalli’s upcoming movie Il rapimento di Arabella), Milutin Dapčević (La chimera [+see also:
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trailer
film profile]), Jessica Piccolo Valerani (Leonora addio [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paolo Taviani
film profile]), Cristina Donadio (The Man Without Gravity [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]) and Matteo Martari (known via the TV series Pale Mountains).

Cinematography for Le bambine comes courtesy of Marco Bassano (I Am Not What I Am - The Tragedy of Othello di W. Shakespeare [+see also:
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trailer
film profile]) and Luca Costantini, editing is by Marcello Saurino (Stolen Days [+see also:
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trailer
film profile]) and set design by Luisa Iemma (Hotel Gagarin [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), while music is composed by Lorenzo Confetta (The Crown Shyness).

The feature is being produced by Daniele Esposito together with Emma Film (Italy), in co-production with Michela Pini for Cinédokké (Switzerland), Philippe Gompel and Birgit Kemner for Manny Films (France), Guillaume Marien for Mathematic (France), Marco Colombo for Adler Entertainment (Italy) and Nicola Rosada for 360 Degrees Film, with support from Italy’s Ministry for Culture, RAI Cinema, RSI, UFC, the Ticino Film Commission, the Mendrisio Film Fund, the Emilia Romagna Region and Lazio Cinema International.