Elio Sorrentino is a strikingly handsome young man from Puglia in his mid-twenties, a boy who seems quite literally “kissed by the sun”.

His gift is entertaining people: making them laugh, singing, doing impressions. Re per una sera, a hugely popular talent show, appears to be his passport to the future.

But success proves to be a poisoned gift. His private life becomes public, old friendships change and people begin to drift away.

And the higher the rise, the harder the fall, especially when an old wound has never healed.

Elio was abandoned by his mother when he was four years old. Ever since, he has been consumed by the search for a lost love that has grown too large in his imagination ever to be real.