LE PERFEZIONI

A lucid and bittersweet story on dreams and disillusionment. A young couple decide to move abroad to build the life they dream of: a different life, cosmopolitan and free. What are they running away from? And at what price?

Young digital creatives Anna and Tom moved to Berlin together because they felt they lacked "the freedom to be themselves, reinvent themselves and be different from themselves". Their dream life is also that of an entire generation, expressed through images on social media feeds and stories: a bright flat full of plants, a passion for food and progressive politics, a relationship open to sexual experimentation and partially illegal evenings. This is the life of many of their peers in Berlin, but also in Brooklyn, Rome, Stockholm and Milan. They are partners in crime, they are close, they are happy, as long as their lives correspond to the image they dream of. But outside the edges of that image they created for themselves, a deaf dissatisfaction grows. Working as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back to their country, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-like life - well-furnished but flat, limited - Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, before they begin to look for a more welcoming, and more authentic, elsewhere, if one exists. Vincenzo Latronico meticulously depicts the endless pursuit of an increasingly fragile and rare authenticity. Vincenzo Latronico was born in Rome in 1984 and currently lives in Berlin. He published three novels with Bompiani: Ginnastica e rivoluzione (2008; Giuseppe Berto Award), La cospirazione delle colombe (2011; Napoli Award, Bergamo Award), La mentalità dell'alveare (2013). With Quodlibet Humboldt he published Narciso nelle colonie (2013), an essay on Ethiopia. He worked extensively as an art critic and translator of authors such as Orwell, Wilde and Dumas. He has collaborated with Italian newspapers "Il Corriere della Sera", "Internazionale" and "il Post". He teaches at the Holden School in Turin.