Human Rights Youth

Ang Lihim ni Lea by Rico Gutierrez
Philippines, 5′
When Lea moves with her father to their new home, she suddenly gains the power to walk through walls and closed doors. He doesn’t tell anyone, not even his mother who works as a nurse in London. At school, Lea tries her new power to no avail. Noticing her strange behavior, Professor Cynthia soon discovers that Lea’s power is actually her ability to survive the excruciating trauma of her father’s sexual harassment.

The place of Happiness by Aliosha Massine
Italy, 15′
One morning in December, Rami, an irregular immigrant of Syrian origins, flees the city and leaves for the countryside with a backpack on his shoulders. Rosa, a young Italian woman, does the same thing: on the side of the road, as the cars go by, she takes off her high heels, puts on her boots and, leaving civilization behind, she goes into the woods. They both reach the top of a hill where four of their friends are waiting to take part in a ritual and party that would be unthinkable in the city.

My father’s Naples by Alessia Bottone
Italy, 20′
Joseph looked at the horizon as one observes a desire, as something to reach in order to try to be free. Since childhood, his daughter Alessia, the director, often saw him look out the window, wondering what was able to attract his attention so intensely. Several years later, during a return trip to Naples, her father’s hometown, Alessia finds herself observing her father again. Also this time Giuseppe is always in profile and, while the landscape flows framed in the window of a train, his gaze tries to capture every moment, to stop those moments and save them from the fast passage of time. The father describes his Naples and his childhood conceived in the Vicaria district, among the migrants who crowded the station, Nanninella, Don Mario and his friend Napoleon with whom he explored the city with two taralli in his pockets and many dreams in his head. Giuseppe’s story also focuses on the theme of escape as well as on the fear of the unknown that unites Italian emigrants of the last century with the cardboard suitcase, to migrants on board the boats of today. While the train devours the rails kilometer after kilometer, Alessia manages to understand what her father was thinking and what he saw when he looked out the window: his memories. The return to Naples therefore turns into an opportunity to tell the journey of a lifetime and learn about one’s origins. Because as far as we can I love to go, we always go back to where it all started.