Fortuna

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
Martin Amis

In a suburb enveloped in concrete and suspended silences, Fortuna’s story unfolds—a visionary nightmare filtered through the oneiric gaze of betrayed childhood. Through a brutalist and disquieting architecture, the camera embraces darkness with metaphysical plasticity; every frame is a monolith, every shift of cinematic format (from the narrow square to the evocative rectangle) a broken fragment of the protagonist’s experience.

The child—once called Nancy, now self-named Fortuna—erects an imaginative kingdom against concrete horror: a dark fairy tale that becomes an aesthetics of pain. In this visual matter, horror is never shown, but insinuates itself like a corrupted shadow, amplified precisely by the unsaid and the off-screen.

Against these spectral figures, suspended in another dimension, stand sequences that open glimpses of fantasy—imaginary universes in which Fortuna takes refuge so as not to succumb to horror. Yet even these visions, if observed closely, never offer a pure escape: they always converge into a distortion of reality, as though the child’s eye can no longer grasp it for what it is—too unbearable in its nakedness.

The film takes the form of a fractured allegory: reality and hallucination coexist in a space where dream reinvigorates mutilated memory. The dual structure—two acts, with broken visual geometries—disarticulates the visible to stimulate imagination, entrusting absence with a stronger narrative force.

The tragedy of a childhood bartered away to the brutality of the adult world pulses through the work, and cinematography becomes a visual metaphor for that betrayal. The building, erected like a nuclear tower of solitude, symbolizes a surrendered universe, where disorientation finds refuge only in emptiness.

The direction moves along the edge of the unspeakable: the monster is never shown, but it looms, insinuating itself into the viewer’s mind through a masterful use of the off-screen. It is a hidden horror rooted in aesthetics, transforming pain into vision.

The story, inspired by the tragic real case of Fortuna Loffredo—who died after abuse and deceit in an abyss of silence—transfigures trauma into dream, generating a poetics that is catharsis and metaphorical revenge. The direction inscribes redemption within the oneiric, restoring dignity and immortality to the little heroine.

At the center, the child’s performance and the alternation between the protective mother and the “distracted” psychologist become archetypes of ambivalent feelings, reflected in a fractured mirror.

The visual path, poised between fairy tale and nightmare, rests on a territory where cinema acts as a rite of redemption: it restores to the protagonist her denied inner space, leading her to an invented star, sovereign of an imaginary planet, condemning betrayal to oblivion and leaving the viewer’s gaze with the spark of a surviving hope.

The child’s worldview is never linear but appears as a broken prism, deformed, irreparably corrupted. Her perception twists and distorts, because what has been deformed first of all is her body, her violated innocence, her elementary right to trust and to life. The film records her inner fracture, letting it emerge in images that oscillate between the phantasmatic and the metaphysical, between scenarios that do not belong to tangible reality but to an inner projection that becomes a survival tool.

It is an oblique reality, filtered through dream and trauma, where imagination does not truly liberate but transfigures, offering only a fragile mask to what remains unspeakable.

Within this dialectic of perceptions, the terrace becomes the symbolic heart of the film: a space suspended between sky and abyss, an ambiguous place that contains within itself both play and domination, violence and escape, dream and danger, encounter and clash. It is on that exposed surface—projected outward and yet claustrophobic—that the protagonist’s existential nightmare unfolds. The terrace is not merely a physical place, but an ontological crossroads, a threshold where the child’s lightness in running and laughing is overturned into the vertigo of falling and the brutality of abuse.

Within this suspended space emerges the figure of the white-haired child, a disquieting and metaphorical epiphany, symbol of an innocence that can no longer find roots and that becomes emblem of collective silence. Her spectral presence is the visible sign of an erasure tattooed on children’s skin, a traumatic memory that the adult community seeks to conceal but that returns, insistently, in the form of a fragile body and an image that can no longer be erased. In her is condensed the echo of silence, of invisible transparency—mute and half-blind.

The greatest evil is that committed by no one, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
Hannah Arendt