10/08/2026 - With realism and poetry, Dario Albertini portrays people who have chosen to come together to live out their own utopias, keeping the world around them at arm’s length

Italian director Dario Albertini presents his third fiction feature, Armony, on the enormous screen of the Locarno Film Festival’s Piazza Grande. After years spent working in documentary, Albertini approaches fiction filmmaking with the same gaze – curious, incisive and deeply human all at once. It is a hallmark of his work that turns fiction into a mirror of reality, a poetic transcription of human emotions that are so often relegated to the shadows. Armony is a film that explores family bonds through the eyes of a character that has chosen solitude as his companion in life, cutting himself off from a world dominated by a frenzy he cannot understand.

Armony, the film’s protagonist (an outstanding Valerio Mastandrea), belongs to a chosen family made up of just a handful of people who love and profoundly respect one another. From the outside, this tribe might appear strange, unconventional and somewhat lopsided, but certainly not to those who are part of it. Armony is a recently retired truck driver, reserved and only truly at ease with his neighbour Pamela, a transgender woman (played by the iconic Pamela Schettino), with whom he spends quiet evenings as though they were an old couple, even though theirs is not a relationship founded on a normative institutional arrangement such as marriage. His everyday routine is turned upside down by his young niece Carlotta, who is suddenly abandoned by her mother (Asia Argento) and whom Armony must now look after. Carlotta does not know her uncle, because her mother distanced herself from her brother 25 years earlier, cutting ties with the only member of her family she had left. Determined to take care of his niece despite the difficulties of everyday life, Armony fights to keep her with him after social services threaten to place her in a group home. Forced to embark on a complex and emotionally demanding process to obtain legal guardianship, the protagonist gradually begins opening himself up to new human connections and emotional bonds that he had kept at bay for so long, whether out of fear or perhaps simply out of habit.

Armony is a powerful, profoundly human and at times delightfully ironic film – one of those works that shows reality for what it is, in all its radiant and unsettling imperfection. Its characters, and especially its female ones, never allow themselves to be crushed by their circumstances or to slip into a kind of self-pitying victimhood. Instead, they feed off their difficulties, transforming them into strength and vital energy. Populated by moving characters who shine with sincerity – above all, the wonderful Pamela, played by the magnificent Schettino, an icon of Claudio Caligari’s cult film Toxic Love as well as of the wider Italian transgender community – Armony strikes a deeply affecting chord.

Challenging stereotypes surrounding gender as well as marginalisation, the film prompts us to reflect on the concept of family and, above all, on that of living at society’s margins. Armony’s family is regarded by the system as anomalous, different and potentially dangerous because it is anti-normative, founded not on blood ties, but on solidarity and mutual respect. The members of this family – which, on closer inspection, is profoundly queer in the way it challenges conventions and eludes every possible classification – have chosen one another. They have entered into a pact of alliance and non-judgement that binds them together permanently. Armony and the film’s female protagonists refuse to play the roles assigned to them by a society that prefers conformity to critical thought. Consciously, or perhaps unconsciously, they rebel against a form of social determinism that would have them defenceless and submissive. In keeping with the closing quotation from Italian writer Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Armony is a film that gives a voice to those who are usually denied one, and reveals the beauty of solidarity, of living together and of utopias built on fragility understood as a source of strength, rather than weakness.

Armony was produced by Italian companies The Apartment, Damocle and Rai Cinema, and is sold internationally by True Colours.

(Translated from Italian)