Cinema Eliseo | at 05pm
Directed by: Francesco Mastroleo
Starring: Maria Fernanda Durán Rodriguez, Quique Hernandez Perez
Year: 2025
Country: Spain, Italy, Australia
Running Time: 19′
Produced by: La Selva, Panoramic Studio, Werner Herzog Foundation, Dianto Film, Meltedtape Films
Distributed by: Lights On – WORLD SALES
Plot: A gardener works in a large resort on the island of La Palma. Every day he tends to swimming pools, hedges, flowerbeds, and ornamental plants, domesticated copies of the wild nature that surrounds him. Yet within himself he repeats, like a prayer: “This is my garden, here I will build my garden.” His true happiness is not found in the artificial order of tourism, but in the desire to bring new life to the ruins left by the volcano. So, he decides to go up to the summit, where the earth is still wounded, and there carry out his daily ritual, fragile, like an act of faith. In the same hotel, a young tourist grows restless. Through her eyes, we see the island half-asleep, suspended between wild nature and kitsch infrastructures, between the promise of leisure and the underground vibration of the earth. She, too, searches for meaning in the landscape: reflecting on utopia and on the very essence of happiness. Felicidad is the story of two solitudes that, for an instant, seem to meet. He, a man scarred by natural catastrophe; she, a girl adrift in her own unease. The island becomes the symbolic place of their encounter, a laboratory of opposing forces where nature resists and humanity attempts to invent a utopia.