Red Like the Sky

An accident in 1970 takes ten-year-old Mirco's sight. Italy at the time routed blind children into separate schools, so Mirco is sent to a boarding school in Genoa. There he finds the school's tape recorder and starts building stories out of sound: footsteps, water, paper, a door hinge. Cristiano Bortone did not invent this. Mirco Mencacci is real, and became one of Italian cinema's well-known sound designers. The film tells it not as a success story but as a boy rebuilding the world with the one tool he has. The child performers carry most of the screen. It played as a special event at the first Rome Film Festival in 2006 and won the David Giovani, the youth jury prize, at the 2007 David di Donatello awards. Who it's for: Viewers drawn to true stories told from a child's vantage, and to films that make sound design feel like storytelling. Who it's not for: The emotional steering is overt and the ending is consoling, which will read as too soft to anyone wanting distance or friction.