My mother was born in 1938 and died in 1972, when I was 7 years old. I don’t have many memories of her, but I’ve always known that the whole visual memory of my family was locked inside a closet in my grandparent’s home. This closet contained old film boxes, amateur 16mm films that my grandfather shot between 1926 and the 70s. It was only after many years, as a grown up woman, that I dared look at those films for the first time, with great curiosity and strong emotion, especially those marked with an “L”, the initial of my mother’s name: Liseli. As if by magic that misterious and unknown person projected on the screen in front of me seemed alive. In just a second I was thrown back to the past, in the time when my mother lived. My mother, whom I had known very little and forgotten for the most. The film starts with the sound recording of a 45 rpm record with the real voice of my mother talking to me; it goes on interweaving readings of letters and private journals written by my mother and that of medical reports from hospitals where my mother spent several periods. Through those words it is possible to reconstruct her whole life in the different times: childhood, love, family, illness, existential malaise.

biografia

Alina Marazzi is a film and documentary director. Her main body of work focuses on female subjectivity, motherhood, and memory: Un’ora sola ti vorrei – For one more hour with you (2002) is her first personal film, a montage of her family homemovies, telling the life of her lost mother. Per Sempre-Forever (2005), a documentary about cloister nuns. Vogliamo anche le rose - We want roses too (2007) – a feature lenght documentary - tells the lives and experiences of Italian women during the sexual revolution in the 1970s, entirely made with archival footage and women’s personal writings of the time. Tutto parla di te - All about you (2013) tackles the controversial issue of ambivalent feelings in motherhood; a fiction intertwined with documentary footage, homemovies, stopmotion animation. For theatre she has curated the multi-screen visuals for Il Sogno di una cosa, a contemporary music opera by Mauro Montalbetti. Confini - Borderlands is her latest work, a short montage film based on archival footage from WWI featuring poet Mariangela Gualtieri reading her poems.

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