Little Italy

What began idyllically as a jointly run pizzeria is now two side by side, where the two heads of the family do not let each other’s hair down. Her two children, Nikki ( Emma Roberts ) and Leo ( Hayden Christensen ), also suffer as a result. When they were kids they played together in the streets of Little Italy in Toronto, she later went to London to do her culinary training in a Michelin-starred restaurant, while he endured his father’s never-ending arguments in his pizzeria. When Nikki’s boss offers her to run her new restaurant, she returns home for a few weeks to prepare. Everything is the same there… almost everything. Little Leo has now become a real heartthrob. After years of being strangers, the two get closer again and it doesn’t take long for the first sparks to fly. The only problem: is your two families! Nobody is allowed to find out about it, but neither can they keep it a secret forever. If only someone knew what started the fight back then.

Two families, a fight, and lots of pizza! The recipe of the modern romantic comedy is well known: Take two unequal lovebirds, sprinkle them with a little romance and then throw them into a cool dramaturgy bath. Whoever can hold their breath the longest has the chance of a gloriously happy ending. Let’s not fool ourselves: in the end, there is always a happy ending and who would want it any other way?! For my part, I can still resist and fight back, but I still have to look at them – these RomComs. The Achilles heel of my creative body is steeled by irony and cynicism. The yield of the last few years is all the sadder. A genre that, like many others, is experiencing a long dry spell and can only partially draw attention to itself with glittering pearls in the swampy river bed.

• Little Italy