A gardener works in a large resort on the island of La Palma. Every day he tends to swimming pools, hedges, flowerbeds, and ornamental plants, domesticated copies of the wild nature that surrounds him. Yet within himself he repeats, like a prayer: “This is my garden, here I will build my garden.” His true happiness is not found in the artificial order of tourism, but in the desire to bring new life to the ruins left by the volcano. So, he decides to go up to the summit, where the earth is still wounded, and there carry out his daily ritual, fragile, like an act of faith. In the same hotel, a young tourist grows restless. Through her eyes, we see the island half-asleep, suspended between wild nature and kitsch infrastructures, between the promise of leisure and the underground vibration of the earth. She, too, searches for meaning in the landscape: reflecting on utopia and on the very essence of happiness. Felicidad is the story of two solitudes that, for an instant, seem to meet. He, a man scarred by natural catastrophe; she, a girl adrift in her own unease. The island becomes the symbolic place of their encounter, a laboratory of opposing forces where nature resists and humanity attempts to invent a utopia.

Filmmaker details: Francesco Mastroleo

Francesco Mastroleo is a director born in 1999, who grew up in southern Puglia near the sea. He now lives in Milan and works as a director in fashion, music, and design, where he has the opportunity to experiment with new and diverse languages that influence his cinematic expressive research. He worked alongside Werner Herzog on the making of his short film Felicidad (2025), a hybrid between documentary and fiction, distributed by Lights On and shot on the island of La Palma within the Film Accelerator Under the Volcano. The film will have its premiere at Alice nella città in the Onde Corte – Panorama Italia section. He studied languages in high school and then, from 2017 to 2023, attended IULM University in Milan, where he graduated in Cinema and New Technologies with a thesis on the relationship between characters and liminal landscapes in contemporary Italian cinema. Le Cento Pietre (2022), Paramore (2023), and Kalimera (2024) are his previous works, selected at festivals and exhibitions such as the Lovers Film Festival in Turin, Odense Film Festival, European Film Festival, and others. He is currently working on a documentary-horror project related to the anthropological phenomenon of tarantism.