«Everything In This World Is Exactly What It Is» by Filippo Di Franco

According to some theories, memory is the very foundation of our identity. To examine its fragility is to consider how, over the course of a life, the self is made of fragments: experiences, recollections, absences—but also of relationships. Within this unstable terrain, Filippo Di Franco’s film reflects on how the presence of the other—those who accompany, witness, or mirror us—becomes part of our inner architecture.

Everything In This World Is Exactly What It Is is a suspended, rarefied work that delicately and visually explores the ties between memory, identity, and time. Set in a lakeside home, the film unfolds through a series of vignettes depicting the silent encounter between an elderly woman and a young girl—figures distant in age but mysteriously connected.

The protagonists—played with great sensitivity by Barbara Suter (Old Lady) and Carola Di Franco (Girl)—seem at once intimately bound and yet still strangers, moving between dialogue and inner monologue. Their exchanges create a narrative rhythm reminiscent of the gentle movement of the lake where the story is set. The lake, a central but never intrusive element, becomes a metaphor for the mind: a calm surface concealing deeper currents. The direction adopts an almost documentary gaze, allowing moments to emerge organically, with an intimacy that brushes against the unspoken.

Their relationship is built in silence, in the clarity of everyday gestures. These two “ages of woman” enact in the same scene different moments of embodied memory. It is in this ambiguity that the film finds its strength, choosing evocation over explanation, presence over plot.

With a sensitivity to natural light and a carefully measured use of cinematic time, Di Franco crafts a film that doesn’t aim to tell a single story, but rather to suggest many: about the end of life, about beginnings, and about the fragile intersection between the two. A film that does not ask to be understood, but felt.