"When he heard I was turning forty-two in November, he looked me in the eye and said, 'Forty-two is multiple of seven. It's going to be a year of big changes: be ready, Eugenia.'" Eugenia Viola does not believe in multiples of seven, but she was always all too ready to put herself out there. She was a teenager scarred by premature grief and obsessed with finding her own identity: today she is a reckless yet wise woman. What she does best, what takes her sleep away, is her work as a filmmaker. But when suddenly life forces her to stop, the film she tells us about is that of the many pieces of herself left on the street. The 13-year-old girl fascinated by the dark protagonist of a Russian novel, the girl who leaves for London to escape her father's illness, the restless 20-year-old who lands in the Milan of the deep 1980s and then in the New York of the 1990s. Until the rigorous present, beset by the neuroses of the Zero Years but filled with the imperfect love for Pietro and her daughters Rosa and Lucia, the only ones capable of anchoring her to the ground. "A Heavy Karma" casts an unusual and brilliant glance at our last thirty years and is at once the story of a woman ruthless with herself but tenderly fragile, cheerful, maternal, so painfully close to the authenticity of life that we feel we know her at least as well as we know ourselves.