Cuore d’animale

A coming-of-age story based on the legend of the Benandanti, characters endowed with special powers who protected Italian villages from the actions of witches and sorcerers.- Pathos, mystery and fear at the centre of a tale that evokes a dark past, bringing to light ancient feelings of rage and revenge.During a village festival, 14-year-old Mattia suddenly finds himself transformed into a caterpillar. This event, which everyone knows as The Curse, turns the young boy’s entire life upside down. He flees the village and takes refuge in the eerie-looking forest that surrounds the village. There he meets Camilla, Elio and Alvise, and realises the enormous scale of what has happened to him: as a caterpillar, he only has a few months to live before the animal takes over and he transforms into a butterfly, destined to live only a few hours. Yet, Mattia does not give up, so he decides to react and understand the origin of the curse.Together with his other companions in misfortune, he starts researching and questioning fellow citizens, until he finds an archive with photos of all the ‘cursed’ of the last fifty years. He also discovers that there are strange connections between the mayor of the village and a witch killed by the villagers seven hundred years earlier. Digging deeper and deeper, the young boy uncovers a terrible truth, buried by an attitude of suspicion and distrust that, like a black blanket, has shrouded the entire community for centuries.