Giulio Parati

Tennis player turned coach Tashi has taken her husband, Art, and transformed him into a world-famous Major champion. To jolt him out of his recent losing streak, she signs him up for a "Challenger" event — close to the lowest level of pro tournament — where he finds himself standing across the net from his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend.

An eighteen-year-old boy is released from an institute for minors with no family support, and for the first time tastes the bittersweet flavor of freedom; an imprisoned mother longs to go back and start all over again. These are the characters taken from the real world and transferred into a film that is first of all a shadowing of human beings, of their hopes and little acts of cowardice. But it is also the story of a time of waiting, of a soul going around in circles, a coming of age in a desolate and oppressive, marginal context that becomes a character in its own right.

Nurse Anna and her assistant Hans work in an old folks’ home that was once the orphanage where they were imprisoned as children, and they still seem trapped in time and space.