LOVE CHILD
WRITER’S NOTE: “Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Goethe might've added, “...no matter how stupid.” We might be better off in life had we done things differently. But then we wouldn't have these incredible stories to tell. And this film would never happen, a film about generational trauma and learning to value one's life, based almost entirely on actual events.
LOGLINE: A young broken-hearted musician seeking a new life overseas finds only despair but also windows into the past on a trip of self-discovery.
GENRE: adventure dramedy with magical realism; AUDIENCE: Young adult M/F
​​
A psychological deconstruction intertwined with historical events about generational trauma, the narrative plays out as a picaresque personal experience, featuring music, art, philosophy and fashion.
​
FILM COMPS: INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS meets MIDNIGHT IN PARIS
​
STAR COMPS: Timothée Chalamet, Lucas Hedges; DIRECTOR COMPS: PaweÅ‚ Pawlikowski, Wes Anderson
PRIMARY SETTINGS: Italy, Pennsylvania (U.S.); SECONDARY SETTINGS: Croatia, Budapest, New York City, Paris
​
STORY:
NICO plays guitar and screams in an unsuccessful grunge trio (yes, it’s 1990). Nico was mostly raised by his mom and her parents, Italian immigrants, in a small steel town outside Pittsburgh, but he hadn’t been in touch with his father for over ten years. He lives with his mom while looking for a job and at last secures a position as a local middle school janitor. On his first day off he takes a bus for three hours to see his girlfriend at college, only to find her in bed with someone else, triggering his severe OCD. Pushing a mop after school hours, Nico meets a student who, taken with his looks, invites Nico to meet her mom, a former fashion photographer. That first session is rough, with Nico unable to get out of his own way in front of a camera. But he at last loosens up just enough to get a few decent shots and the student’s mom plants a seed of adventure in Nico to take his chances in the fashion capital of Milan, Italy, where she once worked. With nothing happening in his small corner of the world, and a bleak future, Nico overcomes both his fears and his rationality by buying a one-way flight overseas with dangerously few dollars and an Italian phrasebook in his pocket.
​
Milan. Nico soon learns that modeling is not as easy as he was led to believe as he repeatedly faces rejection less for his test photos as for his awkward deportment. When he runs out of lire, he's evicted from his humble pension alcove and is left to sleep shivering on a park bench. Desperate, Nico reaches out to an Italian woman, Arianna, to help him find his mother’s family roots in Italy, although he’s too proud to reveal his plight. Nico discovers a new world of timeless refined culture and generational identity. He gradually loosens up, and admits his feelings in a new song inspired by Arianna, but they are unrequited. Nico receives a surprising call from his father with a redirect: a request for his son to find his paternal family roots in Yugoslavia, with no leads except the name of a village.
​
Nico’s adventure alone in a rickety rental car with no heat on the remote dirt roads and hard switchbacks of a nation on the brink of brutal civil war brings him to more shivering and desperation in a land so bucolic he’s left holding a useless map. Stuck in a ditch under uncountable stars in unsettling silence save for a rushing river, undammed, it can’t end this way. With one final heave Nico sets his wheels free and finally finds the village of his father’s forebears, waking up the locals who speak only Croatian and carry rifles, and who lead him on a night-long quest to find his family. At dawn Nico is introduced to his great aunt, and just in time, for that day there is a funeral procession. Nico walks for a mile to the top of a hill to inter his great aunt’s mother, who passed just before Nico blew in. But a mystic generational paternal connection ends abruptly when a bomb strikes the little village. Nico escapes with his life.
Nico's daring adventure releases something deep inside, and inspires him to finish his new song. But he receives a call from the U.S. to let him know his cherished Italian grandmother who helped raise him is in the hospital. He leaves Milan to return to the U.S. before his grandma passes, booking a last-minute flight connecting through New York, with the only available seat next to a young cover model whose career is taking off. Nico shares his wild adventures with her as she takes his hand and rests her head on his shoulder on the night flight over the Atlantic. After his grandmother's funeral, Nico once again adventures to Europe, this time to Paris, to chase an elusive love, but instead he finds, in all the loss and rejection, his voice as a poet.
​