“Deliberately leaving for exile means choosing oneself, not disappearing; rapidly or slowly becoming ever smaller, until we reach our true height, the height of being”. This citation from Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño opens Alessandro Focareta’s first feature-length film, a program evoking with extreme lucidity the principles guiding his artistic trajectory. From Cuba, where the Italian filmmaker settles to take classes at the cinema school, he starts communicating via SMS with his mother who is still in Italy, fighting against cancer. For the duration of his stay on the island, the author undertakes research for a possible film, the one the spectator discovers. By mixing several temporalities, recent and remote recollections, realities and poetic fantasies, family films and traces of public history, Focareta reveals a present time marked both by separation and contemporary discovery of the self. All through the sequences, the film becomes the diary of a more intimate, rather than physical, exile: the sweetness of narration doing hardly more than amplifying the wounds needed for any evolution of the awareness of the self.