You Are Everything to me
In July 2022, while I was in my home country, Italy, I heard the story of a 37-year-old Italian mother who left her 16-month-old daughter to die of starvation. She abandoned her child in her cot, after washing and changing her. The story made me reflect on how something as universal as motherhood can also be profoundly lonely, and how distant reality can be from the idealised images of mothers and women that we are brought up with. This gap feels especially striking in Italy, a country still shaped by patriarchal values and expectations.
In developing this project, I have worked with my daughter, who performs in front of my film camera as a woman stripped of identity, embodying motherhood and, more broadly, womanhood as a state shaped by love, sacrifice, endurance. She represents women who still carry hopes and dreams, yet struggle in silence and remain, so often, almost invisible.
Read about it in Collater.al













