Following its preview premiere in competition in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival 2026, it will arrive in our cinemas on September 17, distributed by Medusa Film The Children of the Apes, the feature debut by Tommaso Landucci, starring Riccardo Scamarcio, supported in the cast by Fausto Russo Alesi, Andrea Aggio, Tancredi Naldini, Lidiya Liberman, Cristina Odasso and Luigi Diberti.
The screenplay, authored by Tommaso Landucci himself, together with Damiano Femfert, has earned significant international and national recognitions, taking the Grand Prize at the Sam Spiegel International Film Lab, the 2021 Franco Solinas Award for Best Screenplay, and the Grand Prize at the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film Lab 2025.
In the film, Riccardo Scamarcio plays Dario, the father of a child with a disability, to whom he devotes every care and attention. The man also shares a wonderfully warm relationship with his brother’s teenage son. As the bond with his nephew deepens, he rediscovers the son he would have liked to have, and takes on the role of the father he could have been. A game of projections and unspoken desires that will end up undermining Dario’s inner balance and sweeping away the entire family.
The film’s official trailer is online now, which we present below:
The Children of the Apes: the film’s title explained by director Tommaso Landucci
The title of this film draws inspiration from the Esopian fable of the same name: the story of a monkey who had two cubs but loved and fed only the favored one, neglecting the other. Unlike the fable, however, here we speak of a parent called to divide himself between two “children”: the real one and the ideal one. It is the tale of an inner, inevitable conflict that continually questions the fragile balance between generosity and selfishness, love and desire, acceptance and regret.
There is a taboo, a “forbidden to say” that fascinated me because it concerns the deepest and most intimate experience of parenthood: no father or mother wishes to have a child with a disability. This does not call into question the love that parents of people with disabilities feel for their children, but, even if a child upends life, in their case existence takes a direction that no one can be prepared for.
Speaking with some of them, I was struck to discover that often, before the pain of a child born with a disability, there comes the pain of a loss: the mourning for “the other child,” the one imagined and hoped for during pregnancy, to whom they must say goodbye before ever meeting him. So I asked myself: what happens to a father if that child then appears? If he were suddenly confronted with the child he had always imagined and wished to have?
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