When college-age Matías attended an international school on Italy’s Adriatic Coast, he fell passionately into the world (if not always the arms) of his eclectic classmates, most memorably a live-wire Swedish rebel-prince named Alexander. Now decades later, as a filmmaker, he is trying to recapture the world — and love — he lost, by making a film about his past.

Writer/co-director Juan Pablo di Pace (who plays older Matías, and as an actor starred in Frameline47’s The Mattachine Family) draws on his own life for this film about autobiography: he himself attended that very school in his youth. While Duino starts in the present day, the flashbacks to Matías’ college years in Italy gradually take over, and we see what has so captivated and obsessed Matías for decades: the energy and promise of young lives, the unrequited yearning for a just-out-of-reach lover… these are memories that will both inspire and haunt the young filmmaker and give Duino a delicious and sexy poignancy. Executive produced by the late television legend Norman Lear (All in the Family; Maude) and Brent Miller (One Day at a Time), Duino also stars newcomer Santiago Madrussan, August Wittgenstein (Das Boot), Krista Kosonen (Tove), and Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson (Succession).