01 Aug IL POPOLO DELLE DONNE by Yuri Ancarani
Special Screening 2023
IL POPOLO DELLE DONNE
by Yuri Ancarani
Italy, 2023, 60′, colour
Screenplay: Yuri Ancarani, Marina Valcarenghi
Calendar programming:
Sunday 3/09 – 06.00pm
Special Screening
Book on giornatedegliautori.com
A law graduate, journalist and political activist in the 1960s and 1970s, and a psychoanalyst operating in prison wards assigned to women who are victims of violence: Marina Valcarenghi is the subject of the latest film by Yuri Ancarani. The voiceover is a monologue in her own voice, as the footage depicts her sitting at a desk covered with papers, a bottle and a wristwatch, in the Legnaia courtyard of the University of Milan, where she herself embarked on her academic career. Her words reprise readings of court testimony as well abstract, theoretical discourses and her own traumas connected to her experience in the field, all of which bring to light society’s fears of the dichotomy between men and women.
«It is a film made of images, but above all voices. I spent a lot of time in Venice for the making of Atlantis and I had to deal with young girls and underage boys. It was there that a friendship was born with Marina Valcarenghi, an eighty-year-old Milanese woman who had organized the Popular Festival at Lambro Park with her brother when she was young. Marina ran the magazine Re Nudo, worked on women’s rights, brought psychoanalysis into the prisons of Opera and Bollate, talking to rapists, murderers and studying gender violence like few others in Italy. Often during our meetings these topics emerged and they were not at all easy even to listen to, but since I have always been interested in moving into dangerous territory, I thought I would put this knowledge of hers into a film, which, unlike my other work, is not so much about ‘a place’ as it is about a topic.». [Yuri Ancarani]
Yuri Ancarani is an Italian video artist and filmmaker. His films have been presented at numerous festivals, including the Locarno Film Festival, Viennale, Venice Film Festival, IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam, IDFA. He has also received numerous prizes and awards, such as the Special Jury Prize CINÉ+ (Cineasti del presente, Locarno Film Festival), five nominations for Cinema Eye Honors, the Museum of the Moving Image (New York); and the Grand Prix in Lab Competition, Clermont Ferrand Film Festival. In 2022, his film Atlantide was a finalist for Best Documentary at the David di Donatello Awards.