Synopsis

A man chases a young woman, little more than a child, who is desperately running for her life. He is Somali, she is Ethiopian, her name is Abebech, and she will be abandoned in Somalia with a daughter and an unfillable void within her. In 1938, Italian East Africa is a colonial kingdom, a new empire born just a few years earlier. Many decades later, in 2015 in Rome, Dighei is a rebellious Ethiopian woman. She needs to obtain citizenship; the government has imposed new rules for foreigners, even those who have been in Italy for forty years with the rest of her family. Her niece Saba helps her aunt navigate the bureaucracy of a tiring and contradictory city: confused municipal employees, documents impossible to obtain, barriers of all kinds, situations so absurd they become comical. This frustrating journey in search of the longed-for Mrs. Wonder—as they call Italian citizenship at home—proves crucial to understanding the nature of a turmoil that, from grandmother Abebech to Saba herself, has plagued them all. A dark feeling, a nagging and oppressive sense of emptiness, perhaps an unsatisfied need to understand who they truly are, the chilling fear of being nothing and nothing at all. From the past emerges the story of a family uprooted from the beginning: Abebech arrives in Mogadishu following chance and necessity, and listening to the omens of a fortune teller. There she meets her future husband, and finally, with their eight children, a semblance of happiness, of family serenity, seems possible. At least until Abebech begins to slide into an abyss where words and the meaning of life vanish. Perhaps she is possessed by a dangerous and disturbing spirit, which only a woman can help her face. This woman has a name that will return many years later: Wezero Dinkinesh, literally Mrs. Wonder.