Bitter Years retraces the life of Mario Mieli, among the founders of the Italian Homosexual Liberation Movement, created at the beginning of the Seventies. Born in 1952 in Milan, Mario killed himself in 1983, before he was 31. He was an activist, an intellectual, a writer and a performer: a key figure in the Italian cultural panorama at that time, together with his friends architect Corrado Levi, painter Piero Fassoni singer Ivan Cattaneo, activist Angelo Pezzana, writer Fernanda Pivano and poet Milo De Angelis. He liked to provoke and to be an innovator but, today, his thought has been completely forgotten. A son of the upper-middle class and second-last of seven children, he spent an entire life having a complicate relationship with his parents, Water and Liderica and the last years of his life together with his love Umberto Pasti, in a very difficult and intense love story. Bitter years are the years a young boy spent, with his alien sweetness, to make his life unique. His name was Mario, or, if you prefer, Maria.