An early short film by Liliana Cavani that confronts the theme of discrimination.

Set between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Zeno Cosini, a wealthy Trieste merchant, neurotic and smoker, is marked by a conflictual relationship with his father and a chronic sense of inadequacy that drives him to seek help from psychoanalyst Dr. S.

A lonely teenage boy, living isolated on an island, idolizes his distant father. Complications arise when his father brings home a young new wife, whom the boy falls for, and a recently released criminal, entangled in a web of complex relationships.