Loose Cannons

Tommaso is the youngest child in the large, eccentric Cantone family who own a pasta factory in Puglia: his mother Stefania is loving but suffocated by bourgeois conventions; his father Vincenzo has unrealistically high expectations of his children; his aunt Luciana is an eccentric; his sister Elena a frustrated housewife; his brother Antonio works with their father at the pasta factory; and then there is his rebellious grandmother, trapped in the memory of an impossible love. Tommaso, an aspiring writer, has come home from Rome for an important family dinner at which his father will hand over the management of the pasta factory to him and his brother. Determined to assert his own personal choices, Tommaso plans to announce at the dinner that he is gay. But that evening, just as he begins to say “silence please”, he is upstaged by his brother who, to Tommaso’s surprise, and everyone else’s shock, reveals his own secret! Vincenzo orders Antonio of the house, kicking him out of the family and the factory. He then collapses from a heart attack and the family is overwrought. Tommaso reluctantly steps in to run the factory but his heart isn’t it. He misses his friends and his life in Rome, but how can he come out now and risk damaging his father’s health further? A surprise visit from his friends forces the family secrets to the surface with other surprise revelations in this warm, generous and moving comedy.