In the international Pardi di domani competition in Locarno, the only Italian entry comes from Veneto with the short film “Mutrion”

Mutrion, directed by 26-year-old Venetian Marco Cavazzin, starring Manfredi Marini (Giovanni Tortorici’s ‘Diciannove’) and Giulio Maroncelli, and produced by the independent studio Etimo, is the only Italian short film selected for the international competition of the Pardi di domani section at the 79th Locarno Film Festival (5–15 August).

This short film stems from the desire to tell the story of a return: the attempt to reconnect with a place one has drifted away from and which, over time, has become at once familiar and foreign. On the islands and in the villages of the Venetian Lagoon, rituals, superstitions and family tales that shape the collective identity still survive. This evocative world inspired the custom at the heart of the film: the spontaneous shedding of the big toenail, a sign that appears only in those who truly belong to those places. A tiny, grotesque detail thus becomes proof of belonging, a relic of the body and a symbol of passage. Marco returns to the places of his childhood, trying to mend a broken bond, but the community he encounters seems closed, ambiguous, governed by unspoken codes. His gaze turns people and landscapes into presences suspended between reality and projection, between memory and fear. The lagoon becomes the film’s emotional territory: unstable, archaic, crossed by what disappears and may resurface transformed. The toenail, left to dry in the sun, is what is lost but also what can grow back. A tale of the tension between origin and destination, between home, mother and the urge to break away once again.

Marco Cavazzin is an Italian director and writer. After training in Graphic Design and Communication, he graduated in 2023 in Film and Audiovisual Languages from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna. Since 2019 he has worked across film, advertising and music videos, building a career that weaves together editing and directing. He has directed commercial and music content, including the music video E tu fai for Bomba Dischi, a nominee at the 2023 Videoclip Italia Awards. Alongside this, he works on national and international film and television sets as an assistant director, contributing to productions such as Disclaimer by Alfonso Cuarón and, more recently, The Studio – Season 2 for Apple TV+. His work as a filmmaker moves between commercial production and auteur cinema, with particular attention to the relationship between landscape, memory and identity. With Mutrion, written with Alessandro Padovani and produced by Etimo, he makes his first fiction short film: a story set in the Venetian Lagoon, suspended between return, identity and belonging.