The Anniversary

A subtle yet heartrending portrait of an abusive marriage and a son’s liberating decision to leave his family and his home in Italy.

Can you abandon your own father and mother? Can you slam the door, descend the stairs, resolve to never see them again? Can you escape the stranglehold of your own origin?

Ten years after fleeing the interminable tension of a muted yet constant domestic violence, a son is finally able to recount his family story and the taboo of his total estrangement. He commemorates this piercing anniversary without accusation or salvation.

The lucid and burning story that results is the portrait of a woman who has given up, who has renounced everything in order to exist in her husband’s eyes. He drags her and their children along in his flight from the world, ensnaring them a regime that is as patriarchal as it is paranoid. The impregnable isolation in which they are confined is threatened now and then by a ringing telephone, by a schoolmate, by his wife’s abruptly banished friend.

In this dysfunctional reality, an insuppressible desire for rebirth burgeons in the son. A desire to be himself, to live his life, to open himself to others without fear of retaliation. And it is clear that to save himself, nothing from that world can be saved.