"Important things are said softly"
I met Leila a few months ago: the first thing I learned about her is that she was 23 years old and she was working as a prostitute to financially support her two children. I went into her daily life and I found a strong woman, careful with her context, stubborn, generous and quite romantic.
I also witnessed her loneliness and frustration. I was wondering how she feels every time she gets undressed in front of a stranger, and with what she dreams of, when I hear her humming a romantic melody.
Months went by and now I know that Leila is actually called Yesica and she is a single mother of two lively children. She strives to support her family, paying on her own skin the price of prostitution. With love and will power, she guarantees them the most important of all securities, affection, on which, human chances of being happy strongly depend.
The family, as a primitive social core, has been changing and taking new shapes: the traditional concept of a family has rapidly expanded to include, among others, the single-parent families, the blended families or the families made up by people of the same sex.
In "The important things are said softly," I decided to tell the story of a mother and her two children: three individuals who live together, make reproaches, say “I love you!”, take care o f each other, play, fight and grow, discovering together , day after day, what it means to be a family.
Today, about 16% of children worldwide live in a single parent household and in 3/4 of the cases, they are only accompanied by the mother. Lately, in the last fifty years families have experienced unimaginable changes, linked with the evolution of a way of thinking and also with the new forms of capitalist production as well as a new distribution of roles between men and women. However, the social imaginary keeps clinging to the classic family type, leaving the door open to the stigmatization of those who live in a different reality.
In these times of change, it is crucial to understand that the family is an active element that never remains stationary, it moves from one form to another as the society evolves.
The characteristics it takes are endless...
