Carlo and Marta are unable to have a baby of their own so they adopt Vinicio, an East European boy who lives in an orphanage. Vinicio does not come to live with the couple: they merely correspond. The couple never bother to meet Vinicio and they justify themselves by saying they are reluctant to uproot the boy from the world he knows and his culture. The two worlds the parents and their long-distance “son” remain distant for their to be any chance of mutual understanding. Carlo and Marta live according to traditional middle-class values while poor Vinicio embarks on a life of drugs, violence and prostitution. He answers the advice they send him with lies because he does not want to break his one link to a world he has always dreamed of belonging to. In the end Vinicio is alone, a transvestite and living in a rubbish dump. He has also been beaten up. He looks up and watches a distant plane taking off.
And decides to make his dream come true. He turns up on his parents’ doorstep...