Along the Ridge

Tommi is eleven and lives in a Rome apartment with his father Renato and his older sister Viola. Their mother has left, not for the first time. Renato is loving, funny, explosive and completely overwhelmed, a man who struggles to find work and pushes his children with an intensity that is sometimes tenderness and sometimes something harder. Then one day the mother comes back, asking to be part of the family again. Tommi watches everything, and says very little.

Kim Rossi Stuart, the actor from The Keys to the House and Romanzo Criminale, directed this as his first film and also plays Renato. It premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. The whole film is seen at a child's height, and the boy who plays Tommi is extraordinary: watchful, wounded, quietly trying to hold his family together. His hiding place up on the rooftop is the film's emotional centre.

It is a film about fathers who love too hard and mothers who keep leaving, and about children who become adults too early. Rossi Stuart is brave enough to make his own character difficult, sometimes frightening. Nothing is resolved neatly. Simple, true and heartbreaking, one of the best Italian films about childhood. A perfect companion to The Keys to the House.