The 2011 film La Luna was created, written, and directed by Enrico Casarosa; it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Film. The Genovese film artist said he had a number of inspirations for the film, including the bickering between his father and grandfather as he was growing up by the sea. However, he said, “The last … inspiration is Italo Calvino. He’s an Italian writer that we read growing up. It’s very surreal work and he had one story with a ladder to the moon, and in that story, specifically, they were, I think, getting milk from the moon. It got me thinking, wouldn’t it be fun to kinda come up with my own strange child-like myth of what someone could be?”

His story deviates a great deal from the opening story in Calvino’s “The Distance of the Moon,” but we hope it will put you in the right frame of mind – at least a bit – for Calvino’s classic.