In the summer she turns 11, Alessandra discovers she can see ghosts, and decides to sacrifice everything to meet her mother, who vanished many years before.
Original Title The Summer That Ended Twice Year of production 2026 Length 95' Country Italy Shooting Format4K Aspect Ratio 1.66:1 Dialogue Italian
Director Matteo Incollu ProductionMommotty Co-Production Terra de Punt Producers Laura Biagini, Matteo Incollu, Federica Ortu, Nicola Contini Executive Producer Laura Biagini Associate Producer Salvatore Cubeddu Writers Matteo Incollu, Sergio Pintore, Daryl Putzu, Stefano Cau Director of Photography Federica Ortu Editor Ambrogio Nieddu Original Music Emanuele Contis Production Design Francesca Melis Costumes Stefania Grilli, Salvatore Aresu Casting Rossana Patricelli Production Sound Piergiuseppe Fancellu First Assistant Director Stefano Cau Color Grading Emanuele Malloci Sound Design and Mix Emanuele Pusceddu Make-up and Hair Roberta Masia Production Accounting Serena Tagliaferri Original Paintings Michela Meloni Cast Ginevra Mascia, Noé Frei Cruzinha, Felice Montervino, Francesca Spano, Matteo Murgia, Michelangelo Piras, Leonardo Pasquantonio With the support of Regione Sardegna – Assessorato della Pubblica Istruzione, Beni Culturali, Informazione, Spettacolo e Sport, Fondazione Sardegna Film Commission – Fondo Sardegna Ospitalità, Comune di Cagliari – Film Commission, Fondazione di Sardegna e Comune di Genoni
Director's Statement The Summer That Ended Twice was born at some indistinct point in my adolescence, in the long summer afternoons spent with my grandparents in a small village in Sardinia. It was in those days that my imagination quietly took shape: a place where the boundaries between what is real and what is imagined blur under the sun. This film tells the story of my two boyhood worlds. On one side is the outer world: summer, friendship, forbidden explorations, the afternoons when you came home miraculously alive after a dangerous adventure you never confessed. On the other is a quieter world, made of fears, absences, and a first, confused awareness of death. I grew up in a village where facts turn into legends. A real event — a person who disappeared, an abandoned house, an accident in the mountains — over time becomes a story, passes from mouth to mouth and ends up belonging to everyone. So the ghost stories I listened to were in fact stories of real people, whose images lingered beneath the surface of the places they had inhabited. In that world the supernatural was simply part of everyday life, and the will of the dead kept echoing among the living with the same force. With this film I tried to return to the feeling I had as a child: the idea that, over the course of a summer, anything could happen, and that the boundary between the world of the living and that of the dead was as thin as a sliver of light filtering from a ghostly shipping container, forgotten under the sun. Those afternoons when you died a little, leaving pieces of your youth behind you, along with some friend for life who would never come home again, after his last summer.
