At the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, the Orizzonti Award for Best Female Performance was given to Benedetta Porcaroli for The Kidnapping of Arabella, the new film by Carolina Cavalli, produced by Tenderstories.

In the movie, Benedetta Porcaroli plays Holly, a 28-year-old woman who has never quite found where she fits, suspended between a childhood she hasn’t left behind and an adult life she doesn’t know how to inhabit. When she meets Arabella, a spirited and elusive child who wants to escape from her self-absorbed writer father (Chris Pine), Holly recognises something of herself in the girl. What follows is a road trip that looks like a kidnapping but is really something else: a flight from boredom, from invisibility, from a past that never quite added up.

The film marks Carolina Cavalli’s return after her acclaimed debut Amanda. With The Kidnapping of Arabella, she confirms a singular directorial voice: one drawn to alienation and loneliness, rendered in a style that is dreamlike and precise, turning everyday life into something at once strange and luminous.