Una storia nera

Rome, 7 August 2012. The day after his youngest daughter’s birthday party, Vito Semeraro disappears without a trace. Vito and his wife Carla are separated. But on the day of her third birthday, little Mara wakes up asking for her dad. To make her happy, Carla invites him to dinner. After all, she too wants to see Vito again. They’ve been together all their lives, since she was a child, they’ve been each other’s great love, their only love, and they always will be. But Vito was also a jealous, violent husband, capable of beating her for smiling at the tobacconist, or for wearing a dress that was too short. Two years after the divorce, the family is united again for one evening: Vito, Carla, Mara and their two eldest children, Nicola and Rosa. The presents, the cake, the sparkling wine: the party goes surprisingly smoothly. But in the following hours, all trace of Vito is lost. Carla and the children search for him desperately; and they are not the only ones, because Vito has had another woman and another almost daughter for years. But he also has colleagues who respect him and above all, down in Massafra, in Puglia, a powerful sister and father, whose friends mobilise to discover the truth in their own way. However, it will be the police that find the truth. But in these cases can there really be only one clear, unambiguous truth? Antonella Lattanzi constructs a narrative mechanism populated by ambiguous creatures, walking a tightrope along the ridge that separates good and evil, guilt and justice, love and violence.