During a thunderstorm, Anna shows up unannounced at her daughter Alice's student flat in Paris to reveal to her that their entire family history rests on a lie she told her. Anna claims to have made a pact with a mysterious Stranger to save Alice's leg after an accident twenty years earlier. A pact that has triggered a domino effect, causing terrible events over the years. Only Alice can help to put everything right. But at what price?

DIRECTOR'S NOTES:
Anna Colonna arrives at her daughter Alice’s home and tears open a wound buried for twenty years, beginning a journey that is at once a confession, a confrontation with the past and a final act of desperate love.
L’estranea explores the story of a mother who seeks control over her children’s destiny and, unable to accept that it cannot be achieved, entrusts it to a woman she does not know. The stranger offers Anna the possibility of choosing – the only thing she truly desires: to escape the terrifying randomness of human life.
The narrative shifts between a present confined to Alice’s apartment as a storm rages outside, and the luminous summers when the Colonna family still appeared untouchable. The film’s visual language is shaped by a sharp contrast: a cold, enclosed space under siege by water on one hand; expansive, warm landscapes filled with bodies, music and the promise of a future on the other.
The spiral is the geometry at the heart of the film. It is the recurring image of an unavoidable destiny, but also the form taken by the story itself: with each chapter growing shorter and more urgent, every choice Anna makes ultimately returns her to the place where it all began.
I spent a long time asking myself what kind of film this was: a family saga, a psychological thriller. But above all, it is a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense – a story that inspires pity and terror, leading the viewer towards catharsis. Pity and terror, violence and tenderness: for me, the film is born from the tension between these opposites.
Ultimately, the question that guided me most was this: how much harm are we capable of doing when we mistake it for love? Moving through the light and shadows of life, L’estranea inhabits that blindspot where the instinct to protect those we love can become the most violent form of loss.