What gets passed down in silence still shapes a son.

In raw, intimate conversations across Canada, Italian immigrant fathers and their sons confront the emotional legacy of postwar survival, Catholic guilt, and patriarchal duty, exposing what years of silence buried and what forgiveness might finally require.

In Nome del Padre / In the Name of the Father is a one-hour Italian-language documentary that steps into the private spaces where Italian Canadian families actually live, kitchens, garages, and funeral homes, and listens to what’s usually left unsaid. Fathers who built their lives in Canada through hard work and discipline sit across from sons who grew up fluent in a different emotional language, and the distance between them becomes the story. For many, love was expressed through duty, sacrifice, and providing. Tenderness was rare. Apologies rarer.

Through intergenerational conversations, the film traces how postwar survivalism, Catholic guilt, and patriarchal expectations shaped a model of manhood that prized strength over vulnerability and endurance over expression. Old arguments resurface. Grief leaks out sideways. Buried truths come up with a simple question that lands like a punch: “Why couldn’t you say it?” As the men talk, sometimes clumsily, sometimes brutally, sometimes with unexpected humor, the documentary becomes a quiet reckoning with inheritance and healing, asking what it means to forgive across bloodlines, and what it costs when you don’t.