ItalianoTante facce nella memoria
29 October 18:00
Nuovo Cinema Aquila
Pub
Festa del cinema
Synopsis
Between 1997 and 1999, Alessandro Portelli collected hundreds of oral testimonies regarding the 1944 Fosse Ardeatine Massacre in Rome. This film presents the word-for-word reports of some of the witnesses to that tragic event.
COMMENTARY
Six women, sitting side by side one next to the other against the dark and unadorned background of a theatre, tell their story. They are the wives, mothers and daughters of six of the 335 men who were executed and buried in a mass grave on March 24th 1944 at the Fosse Ardeatine. Women from the working or the middle class, gappista partisans or daughters of generals and engineers: all of them need or want to talk about it, with sorrow, anger and obstinacy. Francesca Comencini brings to the screen the play she curated with Mia Benedetta, adapted from the recordings gathered by Alessandro Portelli between 1997 and 1999, a piercing oral account to which the rhythm of the editing adds painful and emotional suspense.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
I constructed a story made up of a series of six voices, which retrace the tragic hours leading up to the mass killing at the Fosse Ardeatine; then the terrifying days that followed as the search went on for those 335 men who had seemingly vanished in thin air; and finally, the silence of the years after the killings were revealed.
Director
Francesca Comencini
Francesca Comencini was born in Rome in 1961. She studied philosophy at Sapienza University but left university to move to Paris, where she lived for eighteen years and where her three children were born. She directed her first film, Pianoforte, in 1984, and since then has made films, documentaries, and TV series that tackle hot button contemporary issues, their conflicts, hardships, and humanity. Comencini concentrates mainly on female characters, conveying all their potency and complexity.