Mirrors 2023
La canta delle marane
Cecilia Mangini | 1960 | 11'
SYNOPSIS
BIOGRAPHY
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Cecilia Mangini was born in 1927 in Mola di Bari, Italy. She was an essential filmmaker in Italian cinema. Documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and photographer. Feminist activist and politically committed. Considered a pioneer of documentary film and a benchmark in Italian non-fiction cinema, she stood out for her work focusing on social denunciation. Her films represent the clash of tradition and modernity with a profound lyricism. She was the first woman to shoot documentaries in post-war Italy.
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Critical text
Cecilia Mangini’s career represents one of the crucial points in post-war Italian documentary cinema. Both in her solo career and with her husband Lino del Fra, Mangini was able to portray with discursive audacity and formal power the social contradictions during the Italian economic miracle. La canta delle marane (1961) depicts the summer atmosphere in the Roman borgate, the wretched neighbourhoods that lodged the growing rural emigration. This terrain, so dear to Pasolini, author of the commentary that accompanies the images, is used by Mangini to look at the other side of all’italiana modernity. The cruel and innocent games of some children (that might have inspired Ragazzi di vita) are the unifying thread of an inquiry into a subaltern Italy, marginalized from finding a new way forward. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH
Technical Sheet
Director:
Cecilia Mangini
Guion:
Cecilia Mangini, Pier Paolo Pasolini
Editor:
Cecilia Mangini
Music:
Egisto Macchi
Compañía Productora:
Universale Film
