Name: Per te
Director: Alessandro Aronadio
Genre: Drama
Released: 2026-07-03T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 100 min
Cast: Edoardo Leo, Teresa Saponangelo, Javier Francesco Leoni, Giorgio Montanini, Eleonora Giovanardi

A man in his early forties stands on a grey beach, passing a football back to his son. The light is flat, the sea is indifferent, and nothing in the image announces a crisis. That restraint is the method. Per te, the new Italian drama from Alessandro Aronadio, builds its case in surfaces like this one — ordinary, unhurried, almost mundane — and trusts the viewer to feel the floor tilt before anyone names what is wrong.

What is wrong is early-onset Alzheimer’s. Paolo is too young for the diagnosis, and that mismatch is the cruelty the film keeps in the frame: a mind quietly dismantling itself while the body stays strong enough to run on sand. His son, Mattia, eleven, becomes the one who keeps the days in order — the medication, the routines, the names that slip. Aronadio films the reversal of roles without underlining it, letting the camera rest on small, mechanical acts of care until they gather a weight the dialogue never has to state.

Edoardo Leo, an actor Italian audiences know best in a lighter, comic register, plays Paolo as a man working to seem fine and failing in increments. The performance lives in what it withholds — a beat too long before a familiar word arrives, a smile arranged over a blank. Across from him, Javier Francesco Leoni, in his first film, carries the other half of the picture; the boy’s steadiness is the production’s real special effect, a child’s face asked to hold an adult’s vigilance. Teresa Saponangelo, as the wife Michela, takes on the grief the child is too busy to feel.

Aronadio strips his method down to essentials. The palette is muted, dominated by the cold blues of the coast and the warm clutter of a family flat. The score is used sparingly, almost shyly, so that silence becomes a character — the pause where a name should be, the room that has gone quiet because no one knows what to say. When the film reaches for an image — the beach, a kitchen at dusk, a hand that forgets what it was holding — it lets the picture carry the meaning rather than scoring it for tears.

The director has spent his career in the register between comedy and disquiet, making films that test how much weight an ordinary family can be made to bear. Here the comedy recedes almost entirely, but the structural instinct remains: he builds the drama from the accumulation of small domestic events rather than from a single rupture. He trusts faces and rooms over incident, and the patience of the editing is the clearest sign of that trust.

The story is not invented. It draws on the life of Mattia Piccoli, a boy named a Standard-bearer of the Republic by the Italian head of state for the devotion with which he cared for his ailing father. The screenplay, written by Aronadio with Ivano Fachin and Renato Sannio, takes Serenella Antoniazzi’s book Un tempo piccolo as its source. That provenance gives the film its ballast — and also its central risk.

The risk is sentimentality. A child caring for a dying parent is a premise that pre-loads an audience’s tears, and the true-story frame is a cushion a lesser film would lean on instead of earning its feeling. The question Per te has to answer is whether it finds anything underneath the obvious emotion. It does not resolve the illness; there is no medical arc and no rescue, only the slow administration of loss. It also keeps largely to the family’s interior, leaving the social scaffolding around a young carer — school, the state, the cost — mostly off-screen. What the film offers is attention rather than argument, and viewers wanting the second may find the first thin.

The credited principals include Edoardo Leo, Teresa Saponangelo, Javier Francesco Leoni and Giorgio Montanini as Nicola, alongside Eleonora Giovanardi. Per te runs 100 minutes. It is produced by PiperFilm, Lungta Film and Alea Film in collaboration with Netflix, which points the film toward a streaming life well beyond its theatrical window.

Per te premiered in the Alice nella Città section of the Rome Film Festival and opened in Italian theaters on October 17, 2025. It reaches Spanish cinemas as Cosas que no olvidaré on July 3, 2026. No English-language theatrical release has been confirmed; for now the surest path to the film runs through those dates and, in time, its streaming home.