Tutte le volte che sono diventato grande

Lucio lives in Sicily with his parents and little sister. Lucio is more mature than his age, but this is not something he has chosen or cultivated: he is expected to be a little man, to learn early on to fend for himself and to take care of his younger sister. There is tension at home between his parents, and Lucio does not know where to turn to avoid finding himself caught in the crossfire of their constant arguments.
Little by little, things change, both inside and around Lucio. Thanks to the cartoons he watches on TV and his discovery of comic books, he realises that he wants to tell stories in life, while the onset of puberty makes him aware of aspects of himself that he had never considered before. His parents are, each in their own way, closed off, and Lucio wonders whether it will be more difficult to tell them that he wants to enrol in art school to study comics, or that he has realised he is gay. Giulio Macaione draws on real memories to tell a fictional story that makes it clear that “finding one’s place in the world” is a process that concerns what we have inside, even before it concerns the outside world, and that sometimes, for fear of disappointing the people who love us, we risk disappointing ourselves.