1944. In a tiny Italian mountain village, war is a distant but omnipresent horizon. Here lives the numerous family of the local teacher, a strange intellectual peasant. His three daughters, as a small community, share a single bed and the dreams of those who are no longer a child and not yet a woman. The arrival of some refugee soldiers leads to the
marriage of Lucia, the eldest, turning the trio into a duo.

Sister orphans, Nanda and Flavia find themselves opposed by the preference their father reveals more and more for the second, leaving Nanda alone with her own wishes.

The most surprising fate, however, occurs to Lucia: at the end of the war, a trip of her husband to his native Sicily and a single shot turn two women into widows revealing to Lucia she was just “the mountain bride”. The fatal blow is in fact shot by the other wife whose existence she was unaware of.

The path Lucia undertakes is building her own truth to accept her newborn baby as a love that is worth living for.

"The Mountain Bride" is the fruit of my father’s illness, fruit of that moment when a daughter becomes mother of her parent, cares for him like a child, before saying goodbye forever. A moment in which time changes course and reverses roles.

This is how my father as a child began to appear in my dreams. I, who as a kid saw him and his siblings so big, suddenly found myself writing about them as children. I saw them moving in my grandma’s kitchen, playing in the woods with military remains, warming their feet in the cold years of the war. I saw my young aunts hugged in one bed, dreaming of an elsewhere, telling stories and processing “that story” of an unlucky marriage that marked their entrance into adulthood.

I am writing this film reflecting on wonder for life’s unexpected twists: the wonder of a community who discovered the truth in a newspaper, my wonder as a child when I was told Lucia’s story, mine now exploring the human ability to overcome tragic events even when they seem inconsolable.