Four flight attendants gather in a hotel room before a flight. Chatter about the handsome pilot, first-flight jitters and memories of the Mycenae trip stir anxiety in two of the young attendants. To calm their nerves, they decide to improvise a short scene, which, in just a few minutes, may reveal far more about each of them than they intended. What begins as naive play gradually turns into a mutual reflection.

Through the theatrical form of transformation, Lamedica has crafted a rich exploration of identity that begins as a sitcom but quickly veers onto the runway of Bergman’s Persona (1966), where the lived experiences of the flight attendants demand a mastery of performative duality. The author, a cinema student in Rome, is also a photographer working in the fashion and music industries and has created campaigns for many respected professionals in the field. “I am all that I see,” wrote philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, noting that every object… is a mirror of all the others.

Qiu Yang, a consultant of the short film selection committee at RIGA IFF, writes: “It’s very difficult to make a film about a ‘brief moment of life’, in one location, with a seemingly overtly done topic, but this one makes it interesting and attractive.”