MONSTER (Script)
Francis is a troubled girl living her teenage years unhappily, especially after a fight with her best friend Vittoria, who turned all her schoolmates against her. Her only safe haven is bike rides and the piano, but these manage to give her only momentary relief from the pain. She feels like a mistake, and inadequate. Is she really the monster everyone believes her to be?
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LassiDirector
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Sophia LassiWriter
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Project Title (Original Language):MONSTER
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Project Type:Student, Short Script
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Number of Pages:17
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Language:Italian
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First-time Screenwriter:Yes
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Student Project:No
Sophia Lassi (born in 2009) is a well-rounded artist, ranging from acting to television to singing. She writes everything: short stories, poems, songs, screenplays.
From a very young age, she developed a passion for cinema in all its facets, which led her to watch films and TV series over and over again, also reading the scripts from which they were adapted. In fact, Sophia is a voracious reader as well as a cinema lover. At the age of six and a half, she was accidentally cast as a co-star in Ludovico Gasperini's RAI 1 drama Luisa Spagnoli; The monologue in the self-tape she sent as an audition was a reinterpretation of an episode of Scooby Doo that made all fall in love with her.
From that moment on, she began her training, which ranged from theatre to singing, including the study of diction and piano and she also began writing lyrics and composing the music for her songs.
Under the name of Lady Sox she released her first song, Mondo Fantasy, at the age of 12 in 2022, followed in subsequent years by Mi Limito Mi Limito, Senza Ragione (earned her the second place and the People's Jury Award at the Amnesty International Festival 2025 in Rovigo) and Daltonica. In 2025 she also released her firs song in English: ONE TEAR https://www.youtube.com/@LadySoxSophiaLassi
Meanwhile, she has not neglected acting and cinema, taking part in two important short films (Niente by Eugenia Costantini and Portami a Casa by Ado Hasanovich).And this year she took part, as a supporting actress, in the dark fantasy film TING by Caroline Bridges and Maxie Dejoie- a Scottish/Italian production- selected by I Wonder Pictures.
During this period, her first screenplay took shape, which would become her first short film: MONSTER, in which Sophia is also the lead actress and director, as well as the composer of the music (the soundtrack also features the song Daltonica). . Monster has already been selected in several Festivals and won two Awards for Best Actress in the Tuscany Web Festival and at the Italian Film Festival in Rovinj. Sophia is described as an “exciting new voice in the world of cinema who demonstrates an artistic maturity well beyond her years, balancing raw emotions with carefully measured storytelling. Sophia Lassi's Monster is not just a film, it is the statement of a young director who is not afraid to face difficult truths and transform them into art”.
Two more of her short films have already been completed. The first, NECRONOMICON, entirely in English, won the Award for the Best Short Film in tha Believe Film Festival in Verona and the Sundarban Film Festival in India. The second is entitled Ad Un Passo dalla Fine (On the Verge of the End)) and has already won the 72h Doc Film Contest in Cecinema Festival
The project of this short film was born out of my experiences with bullying in middle school. At 12, when I came up with the idea for the short film “Monster,” I had almost reached a point of no return: I couldn't stand the idea of going to school, I hated almost all of my classmates and the blinded-or pretending not to see-teachers. Every day was like a torture from hell: they humiliated me by throwing everything at me, they kicked my desk and chair, every time I tried to intervene or say something there was someone to make a nasty, vicious comment about me. It had all started with a fight with my best friend, and by that I mean one of the people I loved the most in the whole universe. We were always talking about our future together both in high school and in college (we had very similar passions for writing and journalism).
Only now that I am 15 I realize how toxic our friendship was and the manipulation, ghosting, and gaslighting I endured.
I got to eighth grade that at every nastiness or “innocent joke” I would burst into tears and the only way to combat that feeling was, quite simply, to stop crying. I froze emotionally; I had become apathetic and bored with everything and everyone constantly. After various paths with the therapist and discoveries about myself, middle school ended and finally, now, I was able to return to normal. High school for me was salvation, but one piece was still missing: I needed to close that chapter of my life for good. So, at the age of 14, I finished the screenplay for “Monster,” my first short film.
The short film aims to address the issues of adolescence and the discomfort that we young people constantly feel (especially in situations of social isolation, as mine was), but which we do not have the courage to express or face. Talking to parents, or teachers, is not easy; in fact, adults have forgotten what it means to be a teenager. We feel shame and humiliation , we feel helpless in the face of injustice, we wish not to be seen as victims, and we pretend that everything is fine.
With “Monster,” I want to tell the story of a teenage girl, Francis, and remove the bandages that some adults wear, not out of malice, but because they simply remember youth with fondness, rather than bitterness. We teens don't tell parents and adults everything, quite the contrary! Rather, we tend to tell many lies, just to protect ourselves from judgment or out of fear! That is why it is impossible to always know what is going on in our heads, but it is important to try to understand, in order to help these two worlds, that of adults and that of teens, come closer together and thereby improve each other.
I wish to send a message of hope to all those who thought, even once, that their lives were not enough to be lived, as, mistakenly,
