Some years ago, I have founded an association to teach Italian to the women from Eastern Europe who come to Italy to work as caregivers or housekeepers. During the lectures, between one grammar rule and another, some incredible stories emerged. Right from the beginning I was impressed by these women narrating their real life adventures with an enormous moral strenght and definiteness but without any sort of hyperbole.

Nevertheless, I was lacking to understand some of their points of view: though empathizing with them, I could never completely accept their painful sacrifices. My main incomprehension was how they could lead such a life full of craving and frustration without seeing their kids grow up. I always closed the lectures full of doubts and fascination towards these veiled stories of heroism. A couple of years later, one Sunday in spring, I went to a park in Bologna and was literally raped by the beauty of the human landscape I saw in front of my eyes. There wasn't even one Italian in the park, but so many foreign women sitting around in little groups, eating, chatting, having phone calls. I was touched by their way of staying together, because it seemed like a sort of ideal embrace, squeezing one another. This image full of strenght let me “see” the film that day. Their life stories, full of desire and conflicts still to be solved, turned to my mind and for the first time I thought about a documentary which could satisfy my wish to understand and which would explore questions of geographic and emotional identity.

“Nadea and Sveta” is the story of two persons and also of an entire community of women living abroad. The main focus of the film, however, is not a sociologic view on Eastern European female workers in Italy. It rather tries to overcome the viewpoint of the “hosting” country and to get closer to their intimate universe, usually ignored by the Italians whom they share their daily live with. In this sense, Nadea and Sveta are extremely communicative and “epidermic”. They generously offer us their emotional universe, giving finally space to their longly and solely nurtured need to recount themselves to a languorous Italian country.