by Danila Cannamela
The movie Il padre d’Italia/ There is a Light (2017, dir. Fabio Mollo) tells the story of a road trip across Italy: Paolo and Mia, a gay man and a pregnant woman, meet by chance and travel from the north to the south. The Italian landscape becomes the setting of a narrative of displacement that challenges dominant gender-nature associations in contemporary Italy. The journey allows Mia to “move away” from her “natural” maternal role and Paolo to become the father of Mia’s daughter, Italia. This article engages with ecofeminism and queer ecology to analyze Il Padre d’Italia as a critique of cisgender appropriations of nature that aim to strengthen hegemonic socio-cultural models of parenthood. My analysis plays on the etymology of the term “ecology”—a logos about our “homeplace”—to show that any ecological discourse, far from providing a reassuring fixed home, leads to an unsettling journey through (un)familiar encounters and contaminations. Mollo’s visual eco-logos destabilizes the construct of natural masculinity by creating an alternative model of nurturing ecomasculinity. The movie also displaces the notion of famiglia naturale (natural family) by suggesting a thought-provoking identification of Paolo and Mia with the Christian holy family. This multiplication of differences is ultimately revealing of nature’s complex inclusiveness.