“Interno familiare” is a musical film—not a musical—in which dialogue and song intertwine and everyday life gives way to the imagination.
Over the course of twenty-four hours, the return of a love she has never forgotten prompts Anastasia (Marianna Fontana) to question who she is and who she might become.
In a Naples frozen in time, on Christmas Eve, Anastasia Finizio is an independent young woman, yet bound to a family that depends entirely on her and for which she has sacrificed much of her freedom. When Dora, her best friend, tells her of the return of Antonio Laurano—the man who, years earlier, had kindled in her the hope of a different life—Anastasia is confronted with who she has become and who she might have been. Reality, memory, desire, and dreams thus begin to blur, in the constant oscillation between the real and the imaginary characteristic of Anna Maria Ortese’s magical realism.