Roberto Rossellini is one the best-known Italian directors, a neorealist auteur in the post-war years and the patriarch of a great cosmopolitan family. Even after his death, his magnetic personality continues to cast a shadow over the family, which includes Hollywood stars Ingrid Bergman and Isabella Rossellini, Indian screenwriter, hustlers in the modelling world, a professor of Italian literature and a recluse living on a remote Swedish island. This includes Alessandro, Rossellini’s oldest grandson, for whom this film is a therapeutic attempt to communicate with his family and to come to terms with the family “curse”.

The documentary acts as a personal and self-ironic therapy session that takes on the fatality of this dynasty and how it is dispersed throughout Italy, Sweden, the USA, India and the Middle East. The film is directed by Alessandro, a photographer and former drug addict who is both the film’s director and its “patient”. He sees his position as outsider as being part of the Rossellini family curse, according to which you either become a genius or resign yourself to being the shadow of others’ success. In Alessandro’s eyes, the Rossellinis embody the extreme of a mythological family: glamorous, passionate and untrue.