Penélope Nieto Conti

Clara and Felice struggle to raise their three children in 1970s Rome. The eldest, Andrea, is transgender and yearns for another life where he gets to live as the boy he knows himself to be. Clara instinctively strives to protect her son by escaping into their imaginations to defuse family tensions.

Tartuca is the intimate and heartbreaking story of the bond between Alice, a fifteen-year-old girl, and her Congolese nanny, Lelo. After more than ten years spent in a suffocating bourgeois family unable to express love, Lelo decides to quit her job. Their separation opens a crack that reveals the family's emotional dysfunctions and the silent need for freedom, care, and genuine affection. It is a story of separation, but also of revelation: when healthy love becomes the only way out.