Ti voglio bene Eugenio
Creators: name: Fernandez, Francisco José
Publisher: name: DARIAH-DE
Year: 2023
Subjects: Love
Abortion
Family Relationships
Flashback
Diversity
Parenting and Responsibility
Caregiving
Reconciliation

description: Abstract: 
A middle-aged man with Down syndrome, Eugenio, volunteers at a hospital, where he is helping Laura, a girl who temporarily lost her ability to walk and talk due to a car accident. Meanwhile, he agrees to talk to a mother who is expecting a child with Down syndrome. However, he does not know that she is the daughter of Elena, a lost long friend with whom he was in love when he was young, and that he is going to help the two of them to reconcile. 

Details: 
The opening scene is a black screen with a dialogue in the background. Laura is arguing with Claudio while he is driving a car. She is shaken, claiming that the person that was selling them drugs tried to rape her, but she managed to get away. The conversation distracted Claudio, and the two of them got in a car accident. Laura escaped death, but now she is in a wheelchair, and even though she is conscious, she seems unable to understand and talk. One of the people taking care of her is Eugenio, a middle-aged man with Down syndrome who volunteers at the facility where Laura is being treated. Despite his condition, he lives a normal life. After living with his brother’s family, he decided to move out, and now he lives alone; he is occupied with many small jobs other than volunteering at the hospital, like gardening at the police station, and has a passion for books and cooking. 
A series of flashbacks bring us back to when he was a young man and introduce in the movie two friends him with whom he had a special bond even though they would tease him about his condition. With one of the two, Elena, he was actually in love. The other, Cristina, died because of lung cancer when they were still young. While she was sick, Eugenio assisted her at the hospital, and since then, he kept volunteering there. 
She turns out to be the mother of Laura and comes back to town to check on her recovery, even though they did not have a good relationship in the past. When she arrives at the hospital, she recognizes Eugenio while he is assisting Laura and decides to get in touch with him again, but she does not tell him that Laura is her daughter.
Elena and Eugenio go out to dinner, and when they go back to her old family’s villa, she keeps flirting with him and even tries to take Eugenio’s clothes off, but he rejects her because she is drunk. 
Meanwhile, one family that is expecting a child with Down syndrome comes to visit him to get to know his experience with the condition and try to decide if they want to keep the baby. When they ask him what he would do if he were to make such a decision, he smiles and tries to show them the normal life that he is conducting. However, Eugenio confesses later to Elena that he did not really feel that way. 
At the hospital, Laura is doing physical therapy but seems unable to respond or react. However, Eugenio does not lose faith, and during his shifts, he feeds her and tries to get her to recognize what she is eating and communicate with her eyes.
Claudio, whose friend who survived the car accident and escaped, comes back to visit her at the hospital, and when he crosses paths with her mother, she flares up and gets into a fight with him while they are accusing each other of whose fault Laura’s accident was. He, in fact, blames her and her husband for not taking enough care of Laura while she was growing up and filled up with rage, hits her. 
When she shows up at Eugenio’s door with a swollen lip, Elena tells Eugenio the real reason why she had come back. So, he gets angry because she had let him think that she had come back to visit him and because she abandoned her daughter. Moved by Eugenio’s reproaches, she tries to visit her daughter but rejects her. Eugenio then tries to mediate, and he discovers that, twenty years ahead, Elena had to leave because she was pregnant with a much older man whom she had to marry to make her father happy. Her biggest remorse is that she could not help Laura when her dad was abusing her, and therefore, she had to escape. So, Eugenio convinces them to give each other another chance, and, eventually, one day, Elena agrees to accompany Laura to visit Claudio at the penitentiary, and from that moment, the mother and the daughter start to reconcile. The ending scene shows that Eugenio, Elena, and Laura, who in the meantime recuperated her mobility and her ability to talk, are all living together. Meanwhile, the woman expecting a child with Down syndrome decided to go through with the pregnancy and just gave birth.