Premiered in preview at the Rome Film Festival 2026, Stella Gemella debuts today on Netflix. This Luca Lucini comedy, told with irony and clarity, surveys our contemporary reality and the contradictions and uncertainties that traverse it, in a constant dialectic that often turns into a clash between tradition and modernity, open-mindedness and the inability to change, crisis and the systematic erasure of every critical voice. Produced by Giuseppe Saccà and written by Lucini himself together with Davide Lisino, Greta Scicchitano, Marta Storti, and Ilaria Storti, the film tackles a monstrously significant theme in Italian cinema: the family. Always a small-scale microcosm of society and frequently a Bergman-esque hell that can imprison or automatically impose life rules and shabby compromises, the family here belongs to the provinces—an area where remnants of an archaic culture still survive, making prejudice the pillars of support, generation after generation, as it seeks to enforce, for example, the supremacy of appearances.
Stella Gemella: Plot and Trailer
With a young ensemble led by Martina Gatti and Matteo Olivetti and enriched by the presence of Italian cinema queens Laura Morante and Margherita Buy, here sharing the screen for the first time, Stella Gemella follows the misadventure of Achille and Stella, who have been together since they were twenty. They are now thirty, run a family farm business, have a child, and must pay a mortgage. Fed up with Achille, Stella decides to take a break and travels to Rome to visit a friend, where she is drawn to a promising chef and spends a night of passion. Returning home, she yields to her desire for Achille and, some time later, discovers she is pregnant. The problem is that one of the twins belongs to Achille, while the other belongs to the chef, who has dark skin. Needless to say, the birth of the twins and the revelation of this shocking truth will unleash chaos, but who said that all misfortunes come to harm?
Truth, Comedy, Youth, and Fragility in Stella Gemella
Luca Lucini, who in 2004 made his directorial debut with Tre metri sopra il cielo, loves to helm comedies above all, and while staying true to the genre, he never repeats himself, often winking at Anglo-American cinema and always mixing the serious with the playful, without abandoning realism and plausibility. Even in this instance, the director cares about truth—the kind that reaches the audience as quickly as the tones are light and the characters are capable of not taking themselves too seriously. For this reason Stella Gemella is, for him, a neorealist comedy, and speaking of good old neorealism, we should remember that it knew how to read the era in which its films were set with authenticity, and that also happens here, because Stella Gemella intelligently and accurately portrays our present. In the historical moment we are navigating, aggression reigns supreme and the depiction of violence often enhances the value of a film. In response to all this, the director has chosen a storytelling delicacy. It is a weapon (or rather a gift) he has always used, together with lightness, compassion, and love for his characters.
Another hallmark of Lucini’s cinema is his ability to give voice to younger generations. Achille and Stella are essentially youths, and in youths and their capacity to leave a mark the director places great faith. Achille and Stella come to understand that reality has multiple keys of interpretation and that the relationships between men and women need to be rewritten. Something, however, has changed, and this is why the film embraces a solid trust in the future: a future that can be rewritten by beginning to acknowledge one’s own weaknesses and fragilities, which in Stella Gemella are not only Stella’s but also Achille’s. On this point, Luca Lucini wanted to say:
Scherzando, in passato ho definito questo il mio primo film di fantascienza. In un momento storico in cui si contano quasi quotidianamente episodi di violenza domestica, raccontare che con un episodio scatenante così delicato, la storia dei nostri protagonisti possa evolversi in una crescita così matura e consapevole può risultare purtroppo poco realistico, ma averlo trattato con questo realismo penso possa davvero anticipare ed indicare una speranza, un desiderio e creare un esempio, come solo il cinema a volte è in grado di fare.
Stella Gemella: The Leads Martina Gatti and Matteo Olivetti
To interpret Matteo and Stella in Stella Gemella are, as mentioned, Martina Gatti and Matteo Olivetti. Starting with television, we know the former for her 2018 appearance in the second season of Skam Italia and later for Il Silenzio dell’acqua, Bangla – The Series, and Un’estate fa, where the actress portrayed a young Costanza Dorati. Turning to her film work, we recall Martina in Mollami by Matteo Gentiloni, Padre Pio by Abel Ferrara, Il migliore dei mondi by Maccio Capatonda, and also in L’amore in teoria, again directed by Luca Lucini. Matteo Olivetti, on the other hand, began his career very young thanks to the soap Incantesimo, but rose to prominence in 2018 with La terra dell’abbastanza by the d’Innocenzo brothers, in which he played the working-class teen Mirko, earning several awards. Another notable role is Claudio in Felicità by Micaela Ramazzotti. His résumé also includes Non sono quello che sono by Edoardo Leo, Occhi blu by Michela Cescon, Gli occhi degli altri by Andrea De Sica, and Disco Boy by Giacomo Abbruzzese.
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