A solar storm on a winter’s night that jumbles up people and their feelings surprises a woman who lives alone in a hotel that has been closed for years, sending her a melancholic man from another time; a tourist, apparently, who begins to awkwardly meddle with her solitary life.
This is the beginning of “Fräulein” (in the sense of “spinster”), Caterina Carone’s debut feature movie starring Lucia Mascino and Christian De Sica, which was premiered at the Bolzano Film Festival Bozen.

Cinema is made up of dreams, dreams that are given and dreams that are stolen, this is what the schedule of the Festival seems to want to communicate by opening with “Fräulein” and closing with a tribute to guest Sergio Castellitto, with “The Star Maker” by Giuseppe Tornatore.

“Fräulein” is told “like a fairy tale”, confirms the director who is convinced that it is possible to make an arthouse movie that is also popular.
The leading man, Christian De Sica, is certainly popular: “it could only have been him: I recognized him when reading the screenplay, with his “courteous likeability” he is the ideal protagonist of a surreal story”.
The setting: “I wanted a location that was built in the studio, but that would have been too expensive. I found the right place on the uplands of Renon which, with its fairy tale-like architecture seemed to have been invented”.
These are places that the young director knows well.
She was trained in documentary-making at the ZeLIG school and developed the film at Racconti, the script lab organized by the South Tyrol Film Commission.
“Fräulein” is the first movie to have been entirely conceived, written, realized and filmed using a local workforce in South Tyrol (Melanine Brugger, the director of photography, and the editor, Enrica Gatto, are also from South Tyrol, both of whom are on their first feature length movie).
It was produced by Carlo Cresto Dina’s tempesta Film in collaboration with Rai Cinema and fully respecting nature: during filming the Ecomuvi protocol was applied guaranteeing a reduction of the environmental impact.
Caterina Carone traces the weight of “threatening nature that also teaches us something”, back to her roots in Abruzzo:
“I would like to set my next story in Abruzzo, but I want to do it with the same crew from South Tyrol with which I worked so well”. “Fräulein” will be released in Italian movie theaters on 26 May, distributed by Videa.