Federico Majorana

Rome. Claudio is 15 and wants to be part of the clique. He admires the 18-year-old leader Lauro. If he wants to fit in, he has to lose his little boy smell and learn to smell like a man.

In the Tiburtino III neighbourhood, in the outer suburbs of Rome, a small asteroid falls from the sky. In the following days, almost everyone in the suburb starts behaving inexplicably oddly: they all suck AA batteries. An improbable group of young characters finds out that many have been infected by some parasites and the aliens intend to conquer the whole world.

It is the end of World War I and the young Italian soldiers are making their way back to San Giovanni Rotondo, a land of poverty, with a tradition of violence and submission to the iron-clad rule of the church and its wealthy landowners. Families are desperate, the men are broken, albeit victorious. Padre Pio also arrives, at a remote Capuchin monastery, to begin his ministry, evoking an aura of charisma, saintliness and epic visions of Jesus, Mary and the Devil himself. The eve of the first free elections in Italy sets the stage for a massacre with a metaphorical dimension: an apocalyptic event that changes the course of history.

In a small suburb on the outskirts of Rome, the cheerful heat of summer camouflages a stifling atmosphere of alienation. From a distance, the families seem normal, but it’s an illusion: in the houses, courtyards and gardens, silence shrouds the subtle sadism of the fathers, the passivity of the mothers and the guilty indifference of adults. But it’s the desperation and repressed rage of the children that will explode and cut through this grotesque façade, with devastating consequences for the entire community.

Holly spends days at her dead-end job fantasizing about holes in the space-time continuum and wondering where her life went wrong. When she meets Arabella, an eight-year-old rebel hoping to run away from her self-absorbed author father, Holly becomes convinced their meeting is a cosmic sign, and that Arabella is, in fact, her past self sent back for a second chance. The two embark on an unconventional road trip between two lost souls who might be exactly what the other needs.

At SHORTSTv, history makes the difference between erotic thrills and good hot movies. So sit back, pour yourself a nice glass of wine and enjoy the sexiest movies on SHORTSTv. Short films included: - It’s Just in My Head (2020) by Marius Gabriel Stancu - Sonntag/ Sundays (2014) by Silvio Gerber - A Kiss Too Many (2023) by Vincenzo Lamagna - Catechism (2019) by Sergio Canneto - Loris Is Fine (2017) by Simone Bozzelli - J’ador (2020) by Simone Bozzelli

A comedy feature film.