I stumbled upon an old Nintendo DS loaded with a 2014 video game cartridge that once belonged to my sister. The photos, videos, and screenshots stored within were hers, yet the memories they held were shared: a trip with our father, her childhood friends, the street outside our home, my mother.

My intent was to weave these fragments into a medium that excavates a pivotal chapter in her life, the separation of our parents and her bond with her father, mirroring my own through her story. I interwove them with clips from her favorite game, where the protagonist too searches for her lost father. This blood tie pulses through the raw pixels of handheld consoles, where the intimately personal turns universal, and the digital transmutes into relic.

I never thought I’d speak of my father, because we don’t talk. But through this project, I spoke to him, to myself, to my entire family. Writing and editing this documentary was painful. I didn’t involve my sister until the very end. As a longtime found footage enthusiast, this process proved deeply therapeutic, a way to reclaim scattered digital traces and forge them into a shared narrative of loss, search, and unspoken bonds. Can old game saves heal what time has erased? Does showing her now, Bea as she is today, breathtakingly beautiful, alone yet resolute in the final live-action sequence, offer resolution, or just another return to the checkpoint? End or continue?

This film asks: What stories do our obsolete devices still hold? How do we reconcile the avatars we once controlled with the real lives we can’t control?

Leonardo Severino is an independent filmmaker based in Rome. He graduated from the DAMS – Arts, Music and Performance Studies program at the University of Bologna, covering visual arts, music, performing arts and fashion studies. Subsequently, he expanded his experience in Rome working as an assistant director on various national and international productions such as La Nuit de Martino (P. Usberti, 2024) and Marcello Mio (C. Honoré, 2024), experiences that contributed to shaping his directorial approach. In 2025, he won the Occhi sul Lago competition as part of the International Short Film Festival CortoLovere. In 2026, he took part in the Oberhausen Seminar, an experimental seminar on moving image curation and critical frameworks held within the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, led by Linda Chiu-han Lai.

Through a poetic and minimalist approach, his films investigate the fragile relationship between lived experience and its traces, focusing on loss, desire, and identity through images, landscapes, and acts of remembrance. His short films, both fiction and experimental, have been screened in festivals and exhibitions in Italy, France, Bulgaria, Asia, Russia, Ukraine, the United States and Argentina.