Sofia and Valerio, eleven and twelve years old, respectively, and both children of separated parents, meet by chance and make friends during a suffocating summer in Naples. Valerio lives in Italy and Sweden (he arrives by plane), Sofia is a child from a second union. Their friendship is an “alliance” through which they try to overcome family difficulties, the sudden
changes of mood of their frantic and yet generous fourty-year-old fathers, with whom they spend their holidays, and the occasional aggressive attitude on the phone of their distant or absent mothers. A parental confusion threatening and scaring Sofia and Valerio, from which the two children defend themselves watching the “world of adults” with some detachment. This is the first work De Lillo directs alone, after a long artistic collaboration with Giorgio Magliulo, with her typical pleasant and graceful approach. Screened at the 54th Locarno Film Festival, where Laura Morante, member of the jury, wanted to award a prize to it (she dissociated herself from the different decision), Non è giusto is a film between reality and fairytale. “Without ostentation, pathos or rhetoric, it is one of the few films that analyse and tell stories of children as genuine people, not as tragic or comical stereotypes” (Lietta Tornabuoni). Shot in digital, it is sometimes reminiscent of François Truffaut.

Antonietta De Lillo

She was born in Naples in 1960. She graduated in Entertainment at the DAMS in Bologna and collaborates with various newspapers as freelance photographer and journalist. After working as camera assistant and documentarist, she dedicates a short film to the horror master Lucio Fulci (1993). As a director, she debuts with the feature film Una casa in bilico (1987), in collaboration with Giorgio Magliulo, a cross-section of the world of the elderly. With Magliulo, De Lillo shoots also the comedy Matilda (1990), on a girl whose three boyfriends die, inspired by the Pirandellian La Patente. In 1997 the filmmaker participates in the collective film I Vesuviani with the episode entitled Maruzzella, which portrays the story of a transvestite wandering in a porn cinema. After Non è giusto, in 2004 De Lillo directs Il resto di niente, from the homonymous successful novel by Enzo Striano, on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, a fundamental phase in the history of the South of Italy, from the point of view of the Jacobin heroine Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca (at the Venice Film Festival, out of competition).