A story suspended between dream and reality. A seven-year-old Korean girl who, on a tourist visit to Rome with her parents, is captivated more than by the monuments, by the things she hears and the people she meets. The most invisiblelike the homeless people who sleep under the colonnade of St. Peter’s. The short film made by Pier Giorgio Bellocchio and the Manetti Bros it makes children protagonists of that change in the world that the shrewd eyes of adults no longer believe possible. «The salvation of the world does not depend on you»the father says to Mi-Rae, who wants to give his waterproof cape to a woman sleeping in the rain. But the little girl doesn’t listen and runs away, or perhaps dreams, in the middle of the night to go and wake up the poor and take them to safety inside the basilica. Between fantasy and concreteness, the short film moves between the luxurious hotel room where the little girl looks out the window and the same little girl who, remembering the evangelical “knock and it will be opened” heard during the visit to the basilica, knocks on the large door of bronze and brings the homeless into what is “everyone’s home”, as the title of the work also states. By taking seriously the words of Pope Francis pronounced during World Children’s Day, they become the ones to teach adults peace, important values, the possibility – and the duty – to do that small part that can change things. «Of course, as the father says to the little girl, we cannot save the whole world, but it is also true that the salvation of that fragment, of the world that appears before you and which is your world, depends on you, on each of us . AND, if you save that fragment, you save the world. But, to do so, you need to be awake, vigilant and, at the same time, pure”, explains Cardinal Mauro Gambetti at the presentation of the short at the Rome Film Festivalarchpriest of St. Peter’s Basilica «A basilica which, as Pope Francis urges us, must be open to all». Even Bernini designed it like this, the art historian intervenes Costantino D’Orazio, «with that colonnade that is two arms it sets out to welcome the world»
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A work in progress, less than two months to complete it, «yet it’s as if everything had aligned and even the difficult things, such as closing the square to film, or shooting inside St. Peter’s Basilica, something that had never been done first, we managed to make it possible. We started”, say the Manentis, “from Francis’ message: “Adults have failed let’s hope children can show us the way”. This sentence gave us the go-ahead for this story because the interesting challenge is that we don’t talk about children as a protected species, but as those who protect us.”
The children are the protagonists, as they try to do father Enzo Fortunato, creator with Aldo Cagnoli of World Children’s Daywhich, says the Franciscan, «inspire us with the most beautiful and truest feelings, from joy to shame because even being ashamed is important and encourages us to reach out to others. I hope that this short arouses these feelings in those who see it and that it makes us look at things through the eyes of children who ask, above all, for peace.”
