Country: Italy
Year: 2022
Duration: 55
1941, Italy is at war. The regime reassures that victory is imminent, there is still time to fall in love with the stars of cinema, radio, and Cinecittà. A cosmetic company launches a contest associated with a new brand of face powder: Velveris, the “veil of springtime.” Italian women are invited to send their life story to the newspaper “L'Illustrazione del Popolo.” The best stories will be published and turned into radio dramas, and the winning story will even be turned into a movie. One of the creators of the contest is Cesare Zavattini and the jury is composed of Alba De Cespedes, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica, no less. The initiative is a success, stories pour in by the hundreds, and the jury proclaims three winners... Then everything comes to a standstill, the war dramatically bursts in, everything turns to dust, like face powder in the wind. But the stories of these women remain, vivid, up-to-date, as they re-emerge from the pages of the newspaper. And eighty years later, they are finally ready to become the movie that was never made...
Biography
film director
Giovanni Piperno
(Rome, 1964) worked as a photographer and assistant cameraman in movies and commercials; in 1997, he began making TV programs and documentaries. His films include L’esplosione, which won the Doc competition at the 2003 TFF and was nominated for a David di Donatello; This Is My Sister, which won the Avanti! award at the 2006 TFF; and Cimap! Centoitalianimattiapechino, which was presented at Locarno and won the 2009 Libero Bizzarri award. Il pezzo mancante (2010), about the Agnelli family, won the Cinema Doc competition at the TFF, while his next movie Le cose belle (2012), co-directed with Agostino Ferrente, participated at the Venice Film Festival and later won twenty-five national and international awards. The collective film 9x10 novanta (2014), produced by the Istituto Luce for its ninetieth anniversary, participated at the Giornate degli Autori in Venice and that same year he collaborated with Antonietta De Lillo on the documentary Let’s Go, out-of-competition at the 2014 TFF. In 2015, he presented the short films Se avessi le parole and Quasi eroi at the Rome Film Fest; this latter movie also won the Silver Ribbon for best short film. In 2017, he made the video installation L’energia degli italiani for the Italian pavilion at the Expo in Astana, Kazakhstan, and in 2018, the web series Ogni santo 23. In 2020, he presented the short Come si scrive ti amo in coreano in Rome and that same year he taught documentary directing at the Gian Maria Volonté Film School. In 2021 he presented Cipria.
FILMOGRAFIA
Ebrei in Sudafrica (coregia Laura Muscardin, cm, doc, 1992), Black Taxi (coregia Laura Muscardin, cm, 1993), Mosè a Bombay (coregia Laura Muscardin, cm, doc, 1994), Bananine unipolari (cm, doc, 1997), Il mio nome è Nico Cirasola (mm, doc, 1998), Intervista a mia madre (coregia Agostino Ferrente, mm, doc, 1999), Verdi Suprême (cm, doc, 2002), L’esplosione (doc, 2003), This Is My Sister (mm, doc, 2006), Cimap! Centoitalianimattiapechino (doc, 2008), La danza delle api (coregia Giulio Cederna, mm, doc), Il pezzo mancante (doc, 2010), Le cose belle (coregia Agostino Ferrente, doc, 2012), Miracolo italiano (ep. di 9x10 novanta, 2014), Chiedi a papà (serie tv, doc, 2015), Almost Heroes (cm, 2015), Viale Giorgio Morandi (2017), Lamiya (cm, 2019), Voci a domicilio (cm, 2019), Come si scrive ti amo in coreano (cm, 2019), Cipria (2021), Sedici millimetri alla rivoluzione (doc, 2023).
Declaration
film director
“Cipria is a movie about ghosts: three Italian women who lived during fascism recounted their life hoping it could become a movie but the war interrupted that dream. We don't even have a photograph of those women: only the story of their existence, which is still up-to-date and has been waiting eighty years to be seen and heard. The challenge was to portray their stories with archival material shot between the 1920s and '40s, and with new clips, to give each one of them a face, a voice, and a body once again.”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR: Giovanni Piperno. STORY: Anna Villari. SCREENPLAY: Giovanni Piperno, Anna Villari. CINEMATOGRAPHY: Giovanni Piperno, Angelo Marotta. FILM EDITING: Patrizia Penzo. PRODUCTION DESIGN: Stanislao Cantono Di Ceva. MUSIC: Tapani Rinne. SOUND: Marco «Osso» Furlani. CAST: Lucia Mascino, Ottavia Bianchi, Marco Cavalcoli.
CONTACT:
Cinecittà Luce international@cinecittaluce.it
