A Street in Palermo 2013

On a hot and sunny Sunday afternoon in Palermo, two women, Rosa, Emma Dante and Clara, Alba Rohrwacher, who have come to celebrate a friend’s wedding, find themselves lost in the city and end up in a tiny alley: via Castellana Bandiera, a road that really exists near Mount Pellegrino.

At the same moment another car, driven by Samira, Elena Cotta, with the Calafiore family crammed inside, arrives in the opposite direction and enters the same street. Neither Rosa nor Samira intends to yield. Locked in their cars, the two women face off in a silent duel that unfolds in the intimate violence of their looks. It’s an all-female challenge marked by the refusal to drink, eat, and sleep—more stubborn than the Palermo sun and more ferocious than the men around them.

To test which of the two women is the strongest, Samira’s family makes a bet with many others they know, wagering everything on Samira. Clara’s attempts to persuade Rosa to back down and Samira’s grandson’s efforts to bring his grandmother home only add to the pressure, but the standoff endures as neither car backs away. Rosa’s stubbornness grows from a long-standing frustration toward her mother and toward a city she has never truly felt at home in; Samira, scarred by years of mistreatment and the death of her daughter, channels her pain into this relentless duel.

When dawn comes, Rosa wakes to find Samira still in the car, hands on the wheel. It seems the elder woman has proven herself more unyielding than Rosa, but at a heavy cost: Samira has died at the wheel. As the Calafiore family gathers around the deceased, Rosa and Clara retreat, letting the alley fall back into silence and the heat of the day hang heavy over Palermo.

This story lingers as a quiet, almost ritual confrontation between two lives, exploring how stubbornness can be both a shield and a trap. It presents a portrait of personal history pressed up against public space, where the city, the weather, and unresolved memories collide in a single, unbroken moment.