La pitturessa

Anna Paparatti is “She Painter”: a free spirit with a talent and a vocation for painting. After 25 years collaborating with gallery owner Fabio Sargentini, at the age of 85 — amused and astonished — she experienced a new artistic awakening. In 2021, Dior’s artistic director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, proposed using her geometric paintings from the 1970s as the basis for the set design of a Parisian fashion show.

COMMENTARY
Anna Paparatti: 87 magnificent years old and still very driven, not only to recount but mostly to invent, design, make mandalas, labyrinths and board games, to buy pencils and markers. One of the extraordinary figures that animated the avant-garde art scene in Rome in the 1960s and 1970s, she is an artist, discoverer and muse, and the long-time partner of Fabio Sargentini, whose gallery – L’Attico – was a focal point for artists and intellectuals. She was the subject of an exhibition in 2021 and then, in 2022, was called upon by Maria Grazia Chiuri to design the sets for a Dior Maison fashion show. She is now the protagonist of this film by her daughter Fabiana Sargentini, which immerses us in the objects, kaftans, scarves, jewellery and Buddhist idols of Anna’s house. It is a curious and very human dialogue between mother and daughter, and a trip through the lives, the memories, and the photos of both women.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
La Pitturessa is the story of Anna Paparatti, my mother. Having direct access to an archive of memories of the world of art from the 1950s until today, I wanted to tell a story that alternates between moments of fun and critical seriousness, through interviews with people who witnessed the entire journey, up to and including Paparatti’s unexpected arrival on the international art scene. It is a collective story, told through the intimacy of a mother-daughter relationship.