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Alissa Jung
Paternal Leave
Paternal Leave
DE, IT
2025, 113’, en, it, de
Age 12+

 

The female flamingo and the male raise their offspring together – they have a strong sense of togetherness. Fifteen-year-old Leo, who grew up in Germany with her mother, knows this. Upon discovering the identity of her biological father, she hastily heads to the coast of Northern Italy to meet a man she has never seen in her life. Meeting her father Paolo, she is confused – resentment intertwines with envy as she witnesses his care for his other daughter and his relationship with his partner. To her own surprise, she stays on in the small town with Paolo, getting to know him and forming a fragile closeness she has never experienced before, but has always longed for.

 

One of the most elegiac onscreen reconciliations between past choices and their consequences in the present. The feature debut of Jung – an experienced radio and theatre actress – moved audiences at the Berlinale Generation competition and received the AG Kino Gilde – German Cinema Guild – award. While the plot nods at the legacy of Loach and Dardenne brothers – films that hit you right in the gut, the visual rhythms stride through the saltwater-soaked landscapes of Emilia-Romagna and bear likeness to the finest modernist film auteurs. The emotional strings of the film are poignantly plucked by the actors – newcomer Juli Grabenhenrich and Italian star Luca Marinelli (Martin Eden (2019)) – through sentiment, the paradoxes of fatherhood and a soured estrangement, they meet to gaze together at those very same flamingos.