Paola Migneco

With humor and wit, Crushed Lives – Sex or Kids? takes on the probing but taboo question: what happens to our sex lives after children? New father Saverio films a documentary to get to the bottom of this matter after an uninspired sex session with his wife. Interviewing couples at various stages of parenthood, Saverio unearths the fear and anxieties that seem to universally plague his peers as they collectively experience the quiet devastation of a dying bedroom. Honing in on this seldom fully explored theme of adulthood, director Alessandro Colizzi brings us on a sincere and funny journey into life encumbered by children and the fainting sexual imagination that seems to go with it.

Forty-year-old Marco, married to the daughter of the owner of the advertising agency where he works, loses everything overnight because of a whim: having a romantic encounter with Lia, who lures men online to make ends meet, getting them to pay for her expenses and then running away immediately afterwards. Marco feels something for her that goes beyond sex; perhaps he is in love with her. When he asks a nerdy friend for a place to stay, he realises he has a rare gift: he knows how to use words. So he turns it into a lucrative business, becoming a modern Cyrano for lonely people looking for companionship, sex, love, and humanity, searching for someone to connect with. But Lia is still on his mind, and one day he meets her again...

Like it happens with every family all around the world, also in Italy the spaghetti family, an average, pretty large and messy family, has its own problems. While the mum is the typical "mama", the father is a layabout and their kids, besides being terribly untidy,music lovers and no school lovers, are in eternal dispute with their parents. Just one thing makes them get along together... the unconditional love for spaghetti that they daily eat for lunch and dinner.