Caterina, known as Cate, is 11 years old, has a lot of brothers and sisters, a best friend Luna, a rags-to-riches father, a mother who gets by as best she can to feed everyone and lives in the degraded suburbs of Cagliari. It is she herself who tells us about her life, in the first person and often addressing the camera as if she were talking to imaginary friends, perhaps those spectators who she will drag with her into her world. But today, August 3, will be a special day for Cate because Tonio, one of her many brothers, has decided to kill Gigi, the boy Cate is in love with. Bellas mariposas, the fourth film by Salvatore Mereu, has many strengths and some small flaws. The first virtue is that of total identification with Cate, with her innocent and light gaze which allows her and her friend Luna to go through a reality made of degradation and squalor with the lightness of two "beautiful little butterflies" (bellas mariposas in dialect Sardinian). The world that surrounds these two girls seems to offer nothing, one of Cate's brothers already pierces himself, her sister Mandarina got pregnant at 13 and is now a prostitute, her neighbor Samantha was practically raped on the roof of the building and now he keeps quiet about the scandal by masturbating anyone who asks, including Cate's father and even when Cate and Luna go to the beach there is always some adult ready to offer them 30 euros to lick another type of ice cream. Cate, however, doesn't let anything discourage her and keeps that special light alive in her eyes and continues to dream of escaping by becoming a singer. She manages to tell us all this (and the director with her) without any complacency. It may seem absurd reading the plot but in Bellas Mariposas, despite the subject matter, there is never heaviness and indeed we often smile, especially in the first part when Cate takes us to know the microcosm in which she lives, from the lady who lives there to the upstairs and who wakes everyone up at 3 in the morning to have the chamber pot brought by the cuckolded and supported husband to the brother in love with Gigi's beautiful bassist mother, from the escape towards the sea in whose quiet one can forget about the world surrounding relationships of true and deep affection with his brothers and with his best friend Luna, from the little sister's grimaces to the pasta with mint sauce that the mother prepares in the evening because she is happy up to the father who locks himself in the bathroom to watch the stripteases at television. The other great merit of the film is Mereu's ability to tell a wide-ranging reality. We are in the province of Cagliari but we could be in any suburb of any European city and foreigners have understood this well, so much so that the film, after having triumphed at the Venice Film Festival and at the Bari International Film Festival, also won the Big Screen Award at the 2013 Rotterdam International Film Festival and was regularly shown in theaters in the Netherlands. Here in Italy, however, no one wanted to distribute it and in the end Mereu had to invent a distributor by knocking door to door at cinemas until he found some courageous theaters that decided to program the film. And we are talking about a film that has so far grossed more than 176 thousand euros. Finally there is Mereu's incredible ability to direct a cast of unknowns, with few leading actors, starting with Sara Podda (Cate) and Maya Mulas (Luna) who are simply perfect and very good. What is less convincing is the second part of the film, when finally all the threads come back together and the story should end. Here Mereu loses the gift of synthesis as if he was unable to detach himself from his characters whom he evidently loves too much, he goes on too long in narrating every smallest detail, even losing himself in those surreal atmospheres that had made the success of his first feature film (Three Step Dance , 2003). However, these are small defects that do not affect the quality of a film which, we repeat, despite the crude and dramatic story, has the flavor of a sunny day on the shore of the Sardinian sea with that hopeful light in its eyes that only children they know how to have. The same hope that keeps Cate and Luna hugging each other at the end of the day even if we don't know what will happen to them. We are left with the images during the closing credits as consolation, with the girls finally entering the rich people's bathing establishment and with the protagonists' choral dance, perhaps just a dream or perhaps memories of a particularly happy set.