Goat’s Therapy

When her father leaves the nursing home to live with her again, 45-year-old Chiara finds herself sharing her lifewith the famous Professor Massimo Zardin. What follows is a forced, surreal, and at times grotesquecohabitation among the gardens, cafés, and bookstores of Trieste—and through the places of her childhoodmemories, which no longer align with her father’s. In no time, Chiara becomes a “black belt in patience,” trying to defuse even the most embarrassing situations,because perhaps the only truly effective weapon against her father’s dementia is irony.

The despair of a daughter faced with a father suffering from dementia, who mistakes her for Heidi, the little girlfrom the cartoon, is a wound that opens every day with a cruel sweetness. It’s not just confusion—it’s analternate reality where Chiara, the protagonist, no longer exists. In her place is an invented character, acreature of fantasy with black braids, little goats, and mountains.

It’s a childlike refuge her father has chosen toretreat to, leaving her standing outside, at the threshold. When he says to her with heartbreaking simplicity, “Heidi, you’re back from the Alps! Did you see Peter? Where’s Nebbia?” she looks at him, and something inside her shatters. It’s not anger, nor annoyance. It’s a grief thatrenews itself each time. Yet it is her father who, in his own way, gives her the chance to transform that grief into creation