From Louisiana to the Strait of Messina, by way of Hollywood and the unresolved unrest that today’s America seems eager to suppress—Spiaggia di vetro (Glass Beach), the latest film by Will Geiger, unfolds along this jagged path. Best known in the U.S. for Elvis & Anabelle, a dark indie fable starring Blake Lively, and for directing Free Willy: Escape from Pirate’s Cove, Geiger has built a reputation for merging auteur sensibility with accessible storytelling. But it’s in Italy that he has crafted his most intimate work yet: a layered, lyrical, at times unflinching meditation on the most elusive concept of our time—forgiveness, both of others and oneself.
Geiger, a New York-born filmmaker and son of an FBI agent, has been living in Italy for several years. His apartment in Rome sits not far from the Tiber, and when asked whether he misses home, he does not hesitate.
“Italy saved me,” he says. “Italian cinema gave me back a kind of freedom that Hollywood had taken away. In America, you always have to know where you’re going, who the target audience is, what the message is. Here, you’re still allowed to not know. You can live in the chaos. And chaos, for an artist, is a blessing.”
Spiaggia di vetro tells the story of Salvo, a Sicilian fisherman working in Calabria, where he produces charcoal for smoking by hand. When his father suffers a stroke, Salvo returns to the family home—only to find it occupied by a stranger. Binta, an African woman, and her son Moussa have been living there, with the father’s blessing. She cared for the dying man, who told her she could stay. Salvo wants her gone, but he has no legal grounds to evict her. As tensions rise, the real wound surfaces: Salvo no longer knows where he belongs—or to whom.
“This isn’t a story about immigration,” Geiger says. “It’s about failed integration. But not on the part of those who arrive—on the part of those who return and no longer recognize their home. Immigrants are already part of this land. They live here. Work here. Raise children here. It’s those who haven’t made peace with themselves who remain on the outside.”
The idea for the film, he recalls, came unexpectedly but rooted itself over time. “When I was 14,” he says, “my geography teacher had us play a game. We were to spin the globe, close our eyes, and point. I landed on Messina. I knew nothing about it, but I wrote a paper. Years later, I found myself there. That wasn’t random. It was a calling.”
That calling became a slow, quiet path of immersion in southern life. Geiger lived between Calabria and Sicily for four years. “You can’t tell the story of a place unless you live it. Unless you learn the rhythm of its people. Cinema isn’t documentation—it’s resonance.” And in Spiaggia di vetro, it’s through sparse dialogue, long silences, and minute gestures that resonance is achieved. The film doesn’t preach. It observes.
All the while, America burns. Geiger watches from afar—but not with detachment. “Trump is just the extreme expression of something deeper: we’ve lost our sense of the other. I see it in politics, in media, in daily interactions. There’s a growing culture of exclusion. But you can only come home to yourself when you make space for someone else.”
Is forgiveness, then, a political act? “No. It’s existential. Salvo can’t forgive himself for not knowing how to be a son. And now he doesn’t know how to be a father. That’s his paralysis. He applies for custody of his daughter, and is granted only supervised visits. He’s not a hero. He’s a man who failed—and is struggling to become human again.”
There is a key scene in the film where young Moussa approaches Salvo with trust—despite everything, despite the older man’s smoldering anger. That, Geiger says, is when glass begins to turn back into sand. “When you’re young, glass cuts. It hurts. But if you leave it in the sea long enough, it softens. It becomes smooth, clear. Like a memory that no longer wounds.”
Filming in Italy wasn’t easy. “There’s disorder, confusion, contradiction. But there’s also a rare vitality. In Hollywood, everything is boxed in. Here, at the end of the day, you often don’t even know what you’ve shot. But then you look at the footage—and there’s something alive in it. Chaos can be fertile.”
And Rome? “It’s a city that never lets you feel too important. You walk next to millennia. And that puts you in your place. Italians complain a lot—it’s true,” he laughs, “but they don’t realize how lucky they are. There’s still time here. Time to think. To talk. To be. In America, everything moves so fast. But sometimes, to heal, you have to slow down.”
Will he go back to the U.S.? “I don’t know if America is still my place. Maybe it was. But I know that here in Italy, I’ve found another way to live. Maybe even another way to love.”
As for his next project, Geiger is staying in Sicily—but shifting tone. “It’s another Sicilian story. But very different from Glass Beach. Maybe a bigger budget. But the same truth. Because it’s not about how much you spend. It’s about what you feel.”
