Ilaria Spada: “That unexpected joy during the pandemic”

A love story that suffers a backlash, as happens to many couples. The comedy Sleepless nights, kisses for breakfast by Francesco Mandelli (based on the best-seller of the same name by Matteo Busola), presented at the Rome Film Festival and in cinemas from 21 October, tells of Matteo (Alessio Vassallo), an aspiring cartoonist who leaves her job as an architect to pursue her dream. Dream he starts to believe when he knows Paola Barbato (Ilaria Spada), famous comics screenwriter.

The two know, get married, buy a house surrounded by greenery, adopt three dogs and have three daughters: Virginia, Ginevra and Melania. Matteo becomes the house manager, while Paola is the worker who brings home the loaf, but is not very present with the children. One day something can change for Matteo, finally comes the opportunity he has been waiting for for years: to publish the comic story of his superhero Valentine. Will you take the opportunity to leave for Paris?

“The strength of Matteo and Paola is in being able to find, albeit in the small space that they carve out every day, the reason that united them”, he tells us Ilaria Spada. “Even when it seems assault them the chaos of everyday life, as happens to all couples, they find out magical moments of silence before the tornado of girls and dogs breaks out, reminding him of why they fell in love ». They will have their moment of crisis, but those moments may perhaps save them.

«I loved Paola very much although she may seem like a lonely mother taken from work“, Describes the actress,” is a woman who pays the price for her absence, but then he will realize that he should re-establish priorities without giving up his job. Here, the ideal is to find a center. For me, the center is the family, as the film itself suggests ».

Ilaria Spada she lived with her husband Kim Rossi Stuart «a magical moment in a dramatic context such as the pandemic, a strange incomprehensible magic within our family (in March 2020 the second son Ian was only a few months old). An unsuspected joy that we shared despite everything that was happening around us», Says the actress. «At a certain point I stopped watching the news because the pain was too strong. In that period we have experienced a simple life made up of few things that perhaps hides the great secret of happiness».