24/10/2025 - Alessandro Abba Legnazzi’s film reconstructs a separation as seen through the eyes of the people who went through it – the director himself and his daughter

With Leila, screened in the Panorama Italia section of Alice nella Città during this year’s Rome Film Fest, Alessandro Abba Legnazzi, together with Clementina Abba Legnazzi and Giada Vincenzi, helms a small, delicate experiment that oscillates between documentary and staged scenes, seeking to put together the pieces of a family wound through the lens of shared imagination.

The story revolves around Clementina, a nine-year-old who returns with her father, Alessandro, to the mountain house where the family used to spend their holidays. It is a symbolic place, loaded with absences: it was there, a few years earlier, that Clementina woke to find her mother already leaving, backpack on her shoulders and no satisfying explanation. When asked “why?”, the father chooses not to tackle the truth head-on. Instead, he conjures a fantasy universe in which the two of them become Leila and Tonio, eccentric aviators on an imaginary mission to find the mother.

The film is thus a reconstruction of a separation observed from the viewpoint of the ones who went through it, but also an exercise in processing pain through storytelling. What makes the project so singular is that Alessandro and Clementina are not playing fictional roles – they are truly father and daughter – and their game becomes a tool with which to bridge a still-present emotional gap.

Shot in muted tones, with cinematography that shifts between the whiteness of the mountain landscape and domestic interiors, Leila builds a visual discourse consistent with its intimate nature. Enrico Giovannone’s discreet, respectful editing accompanies the dialogue between reality and invention, leaving room for silences, everyday gestures and conversations between father and daughter.

The result, however, is not without its limits. At times, the movie feels overly Apollonian and controlled, as if the mise-en-scène had chosen to rein in emotion, rather than probe it fully. The pain of separation – especially in its most acute phases – seems already overcome, or at least kept at arm’s length, which lessens some of the potential emotional impact. The conversations, while sincere and affectionate, reveal little about the original conflict, and the few flashbacks are not enough to convey the complexity of a family trauma.

Even so, Leila possesses a grace of its own – a gentle tone born of the simplicity and honesty of the approach chosen. The film finds its raison d’être in showing how imagination can become a means of healing, a bridge between two generations learning to redefine their spaces and roles. In this sense, the playful dimension is not so much an escape from reality, but rather a way of reclaiming it.

It is hard to imagine Leila enjoying wide circulation beyond youth-orientated contexts like Alice nella Città: its language is rooted in an extreme form of intimacy that may not push past the boundaries of a personal tale. Yet within this measured choice lies its purity – that of a small, sincere, self-aware film that manages, in its own way, to speak of pain and rebirth with modesty and delicacy.

Leila was produced by Italian company Start.

(Translated from Italian)