As a child in the mountainous northeastern region of Italy, Simone Segre was tutored in the harsh pragmatism of his Holocaust-survivor father that sometimes you must do what you don’t want to do. As an adult, and a surgeon, Simone (Alessandro Gassmann) is called upon to save the life of a neo-Nazi. His decision enmeshes him with the man’s family, their inherited beliefs, and their financial problems as well as with his own psychological inheritance from his secretive, abused, and abusive father. Mauro Mancini’s impressive debut feature is a complex exploration of place, politics, and patriarchy by way of an intimate character study. Alessandro Gassmann brings a fine-tuned intensity to the role of Simone that leads one to think he might know a little about being Jewish in today’s Italy and also about fathers; his is the late, great Italian actor Vittorio Gassmann, under whom he also studied.—Judy Bloch

In Italian with English subtitles