13/08/2025 - Valentina and Nicole Bertani’s first film is a punk and queer ode to the 1990s and a portrait of a group of girls who’ve decided to tell their own story and dictate their own rules

Mia Ferricelli, Agnese Scazza and Petra Scheggia in Mosquitoes

Mosquitoes - the first film written by sisters Valentina and Nicole Bertani, which has been selected in competition at the Locarno Film Festival - takes us to the heart of the whirlwind that was the 1990s, a historic moment in time full of paradoxes and paranoias but also freedom and feminist demands to the tune of Riot grrrls. By way of Mosquitoes, Valentina and Nicole Bertani tell us a highly personal story about their childhood, a suspended moment when they were constructing and imagining themselves beyond the impositions of a society created by (male) adults for (male) adults.

Both touching and exhilarating, offering up a fierce account of this time when the protagonists are discovering the world and themselves, the film seems to embody the feminist motto “the personal is political”. Irreverent, liberated and rebellious children, the protagonists of the Bertani sisters’ first film become mini killer queens of a world where any kind of binarism is hacked to pieces with an axe. In command of their own destiny, these girls have no intention of bending to the rules of a heteropatriarchal society which would turn them into obedient, well-behaved women, ready and waiting to satisfy and please the male gaze. “Princesses are disgusting”, insists Linda, an outburst which comes from deep inside and which turns into a cry of rebellion against what a “woman” should be.

Mosquitoes is set in 1997 in a middle-class neighbourhood populated by strange characters who are each trying to adapt to a world which appears on the verge of imploding. Eight-year-old Linda (Mia Ferricelli) leaves her rich grandma’s villa in Switzerland and moves to Italy with her mother, Eva (Clara Tramontano). Here, she meets her two partners in crime, Azzurra (Agnese Scazza) and Marta (Petra Scheggia), who soon become an inseparable trio who’ll do anything to write their own stories unconstrained by the impositions of a world of adults on the slide. Their parents, and all the other adults in the film, are selfish, bitter and gossipy, but they’re also extremely fragile, comforted by broken dreams which they nevertheless insist on following. An endearing queer babysitter called Carletto, played magnificently by Milutin Dapčević, takes care of the three protagonists. In a parallel world which he’s constructed in order to survive and fight against a homophobic society which considers him a persona non grata, Carletto dreams of being Lady Di or Gianni Versace’s new lover. Marta, Azzurra and Linda immediately adopt him as their guide towards a parallel world which is fluid and welcoming towards difference and where the latter is seen as a strength rather than a weakness. “You can only be handsome if you’re weird”, Linda tells Azzurra, referring to the two twins in the film. It’s an implacable sentence; an atomic bomb which makes strangeness a weapon of mass destruction.

In addition to offering a moving and staggering ode to queerness (the passionate kiss between Carletto and his lover will soon become legendary), Mosquitoes also explores childhood and addiction - two themes which our society refuses to link together - with courage and humanity. Eva’s drug addiction, and the drugs taken during endless evenings in nightclubs, are an integral part of the story and of the lives of these young protagonists, who watch with curiosity and fear as the adults around them fall apart. The brave decision to explore childhood and the fragility of adults without resorting to stereotypes is reminiscent of works along the lines of Welcome to the Doll House by Todd Solondz or Gummo by Harmony Korine. In short, Mosquitoes is a powerful, poignant and courageous film about difference, and a punk, feminist ode to the fluidity of life.

Mosquitoes was produced by Emma Film (Italy) in co-production with Cinédokké (Switzerland) and Manny Films (France). World sales are entrusted to Intramovies.

(Translated from Italian)