Raffaele Taddei

Albertine is the most controversial character of Recherche du temps perdu, the most mentioned yet the one we know the least about: we do not know where she comes from, what she does for a living, where she ends up… and even when she dies, we wonder if she ever existed at all. Several critics saw in Albertine Proust’s driver Alfred Agostinelli, a young Italian with whom Proust had been madly in love. The novel and Proust’s life become the excuse for a contemporary love story – where Marcel, Albertine and Alfred hide, bluff, swap genders and roles, experiencing love as an eternal question, aware that the heart of things cannot be captured, but only glimpsed at.

Life in suburban Palermo can be tough: Salvo is a young father who struggles between makeshift jobs and criminal-grotesque affairs to support his son. When the spiral of violence turns against him, he runs into Ciurè, a transgender dancer who helps him, opening doors to a kaleidoscopic gay night club where she performs every night. Will Salvo be able to overcome his prejudices against the "wanderers of the night" and put on new clothes, to the point of reinventing himself in a new body