On a remote Italian island in the early 1960s, a teenage boy haunted by memories of the war falls in love with an older girl who holds a dark secret. Based on the novel "Tu, Mio," by Erri De Luca. Ischia, 1955. In the waters of the island in the bay of Naples, Marco (16) spends his days sailing with Nicola (52), a hardened fisherman who tells stories about the sea and the war, that is still very fresh in his memory. Marco is different from the other boys, he prefers spending his time in the company of the hermetic Nicola rather than going to the beach, courting girls or bathing in the ocean like his peers. Shy and curious, he takes advantage of his holidays on the Italian island to fill his eyes with the images of a world that is so distant from his native London or from the gloomy boarding school in Scotland where his family sheltered Marco to protect him from the bombings. On vacation with his parents at his maternal uncle’s house, he will live a summer that will change him forever after meeting, within the group of friends of his older cousin Daniele (21), the enigmatic Caia (20), with whom he will fall in love immediately and for the very first time. Caia is not like the other girls either. Romanian and orphan of father and mother, her gaze carries the weight of a sadness that is difficult to hide. Marco wants to find out everything about her and, although he is aware of Daniele’s interest in Caia, he begins to get closer to the girl. Their relationship gets stronger when Daniele rejects her after learning that Caia is Jewish. Marco does not have these prejudices, on the contrary, this discovery pushes him to delve into the girl’s life even more. A beautiful complicity is established between the two in which Caia reveals her painful past, with a childhood stolen by the SS and a father who preferred to throw his daughter out of a train in Yugoslavia, rather having her to experience the horrors of a concentration camp. The stories of Nicola and Caia, meanwhile, will awaken in Marco an uncontrollable resentment for the SS, personified in a group of rude German tourists who tour the island, and through whom Marco will try to avenge Caia’s pain. A sweet and platonic love that will make Marco grow up under the intense sun and the blue sky of Ischia: unforgettable days during which he will discover the world of adults, the horrors of the war and will assist to the awaking of feelings he had never felt before.
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