The movie, mainly in black and white, completely without dialogue and interspersed with moments of reflection for the viewer in front of the written thoughts of the “narrator”, analyzes the psychological evolution of an artist who develops ideas and beliefs linked to the world of art. The story of the movie, conceived by the artist and director as a “democratic work of art”, takes place in the current present, in particular in the cities of Milan and Venice (the latter in particular the key city of the film). It tells of two lives, that of an Italian sculptor and that of a little girl, originally from Sri Lanka, who lives with her family in Italy. Both the lives of the two protagonists are somehow linked by an unbridled artistic passion, and the whole film revolves around the design of a sculpture. This drawing is the main element of the story told, the one that allows the lives of the two protagonists, despite starting from such distant points, to intertwine at the end in a “disruptive encounter between two opposites”. At the end of the short, in fact, it is revealed that in reality the whole film was nothing more than the artist’s dream and that the two protagonists were none other than the same person. The Italian artist therefore identifies himself with the black girl. The Caucasian artist and the black girl are the same person in the film. This choice is singular, linked mainly for the director to overcoming all cultural barriers, in an artistic context of 2024 under the theme “Foreigners Everywhere”, title of the Venice Biennale of Art where the sculpture “The Embrace”, protagonist of the short film, is exhibited throughout 2024 as the official artwork of the national pavilion. Furthermore, the main objective of the film is to describe the psychology of an artist through a dream, a dream in which the same person realizes that he must look at the world from two different points of view: as an adult with the eyes of maturity and as a child with the eyes of imagination. The true artist, according to the film, is the one who looks at the world around him with the eyes of an adult and with the imagination of a child; in practice… “a worker of emotions”.

by Cesare Catania (Italy)