It often happens that at the moment of death, transgender individuals are shorn of their identity. Their families are ashamed, the funeral takes place in secret, and on the tomb appears the name the deceased had before their transition, in one stroke nullifying the entire life path they had chosen. The same thing happened to Antonia. Her girlfriends gather to honor her memory and give her back her identity denied. In telling her story, the film’s stars, all drawn from the variegated transgender world, interweave the narrative with tales of their own lives, experiences, and memories.
Bernard just retired. He is 63 years old. He lives alone with his two cats and decides to move in the house where he will live the last chapter of the book of his life. While packing, he starts to have to choose what to take with him. Bernard is my master and I am his slave. His last lover. I help him put away his whip in a box, between the remains of his memory, tokens of lovers stripped from his arms by AIDS, traces of a foster family that pushed him away, of a rigid education that marked him, of a mother and a father that he never met. Our sexual games are the possibility for two generations to meet: between a whip and a leather harness we discuss love, death, the AIDS epidemic of the 80s, his new life project, us. The wounds and the grave goods of a survivor, a cry of life under the lights of sexual pulsions.
Footwear company Togo was a family business that thrived reaching the point of owning more than 30 stores in the wider Turin area. All that is left today is a couple of struggling stores, enormous suffocating debt, and the desperation of uncertainty as bankruptcy is looming in. Director Gianluca Mattarese has been living in Paris for the last 18 years meticulously fencing himself off from the harsh reality of a family breakdown. Like a prodigal son, he eventually returns to his roots with the task of recording a routine of malaise framed by financial collapse. A bittersweet tale of family bonds, reuniting, and atonement.
