I LIFE OF MY OWN
Clare of Assisi and the freedom to lose everything

Chiara is thirty-two years old, has an important surname,

a family that gave her everything and a life already laid out before her.

During a dinner where she's supposed to publicly accept the future decided for her, she runs away. With her makeup smudged, an expensive handbag, and her phone turned off, she enters an empty space, delimited by a line of light:

a refuge, a cage, perhaps the first border I ever chose for myself.

A man appears in the doorway.

We don't know who she really is: her father, her partner, the voice of her family, of power, or of a world that wants to put her back in her place.

In their confrontation, the present history begins to crack and allows another Chiara to emerge: the young woman who, eight centuries earlier, left her home in the night to escape a destiny already written.

Two eras overlap. Wealth becomes blackmail, protection becomes control, escape becomes a birth certificate. Clare of Assisi's radical choice thus lives on in the body of a contemporary woman, forced to ask herself how much she is willing to lose to finally belong to herself.

 

A scenic recollection of female freedom, the weight of privilege, and the courage to walk through a door without knowing what awaits us on the other side.

 

Danny Bignotti