Jamila is an exuberant Moroccan girl with street smarts, who seems to have enormous potential to achieve great things or else trigger mega-disasters. Californie follows her day in and day out from age 9 to 14, in the small town in southern Italy where she lives, to reconstruct the fascinating personal journey Jamila undertakes setbacks and detours included to find her place in the world.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES:
One day, while we were shooting Butterfly, a nine-year-old girl locked gazes with our camera and then vanished. Her gaze was so intense, as was her determination in a scene in which she forcefully expressed her desire to become a boxing champion, that we often lingered on those gazes of hers during the editing of the film. So confident, yet mysterious: what was she looking at? What was she thinking at that very moment? A whole world lay behind that gaze: a tension, a mystery, and we already knew a story to be told. When we realized she was perfectly capable of handling an entire film, we started working on that story. It would be a story built around her, interweaving aspects of her own life yet not exactly about her real life, which left us the poetic license to craft the film narrative itself.