Il ragazzo più felice del mondo

Based on a true story, someone has been sending letters to Italian comic strip authors for over twenty years, passing himself off as a fifteen-year-old boy. In the letters he always asks for the gift of “a little sketch.” An Italian cartoonist and graphic novelist called Gipi starts to investigate this person. He wants to make a documentary to find this person and interview the other cartoonists who have received a letter. To do so, he recruits his friends - who are totally incompetent. But there is a story to tell and, for Gipi, telling stories is the most important thing there is. But this is also an unscripted story, one that adapts to the discoveries of the moment, and things never go the way we want them to. During the making of the documentary everything changes, slips through his fingers, gets out of hand. Gipi will find himself having to reflect on the very meaning of “storytelling” and the moral choices that lie behind this desire. Looking for “the happiest boy in the world,” in an inept quest with sometimes comic and delirious dimensions, Gipi will find something quite different, and the documentary itself will, in the end, turn into a movie. (Santa Barbara International Film Festival)