I am finally ready my new film work, this time a documentary. I shot it in Mozambique, a few months ago, on the stimulus received by a precious woman, Emanuela Bonavolta, coordinator of a non-profit organization called “O Viveiro” (“the nursery”, in Portuguese), which manages a center for young girls in the poor and unhealthy town of Chitima, in Mozambique.
The girls that stay there build their lives one millimeter a day. Orphan or poor, or both, they get an opportunity to invest in themselves, get education, learn a profession, and re-educate themselves to the affection they have never received, and get a chance to set fractures of their past shattering experiences. Not all of them succeed.
“Dignity” tries to tell, without rhetoric, these girls’ stories; their epic, their poetry, their falls, their success. But above all their splendor.
In this film I tried to shoot images with a cinematic, artistic value, to try and give a feeling of the girls’ inner beauty, their power and strenght. Their ability to stubbornly grow from nothing, like flowers in the desert. I tried to narrate this mostly through their words, respecting their need to pass on their own stories, create their own myth-making.
This documentary is about the possibility of dignity for women, for all women, in Africa and elsewhere.
The premiere of this documentary is for this Friday, July 10 at 6.00 pm at the magnificent Casa del Cinema in Villa Borghese, as it was selected for the RAFF, RomAfrica Film Festival. It will be a very special moment for me. I hope that my story will be worth the girls. Because they deserve that, and everything else in their lives.
Come, if you like, the event is on Facebook here.
