LE ANGELESSE

The film documents the theatrical and cinematic staging of a group of incarcerated women, transformed into a company of performers who tell their own stories. The narration of crime, imprisonment and multiple truths is removed from the realm of news reporting and restored to the universal dimension of tragedy. Isolated against a black background, each performer takes personal responsibility for her own ethical and aesthetic choices. The film takes place inside the women’s sections of Milan’s Bollate and San Vittore prisons. Here, far removed from the rhetoric of collective pity and the sociological categories of deviance, a radical formal choice is made: the protagonists are isolated against an entirely black background. Under this geometric, surgical light, stripped of environmental alibis and systemic justifications, the State disappears, leaving only the individual. Transcending the cell does not mean escaping through anarchy, but through the rigor of technique. Hence the title, Le Angelesse (id: Female angels): their angelic flight is the paradoxical emancipation of the mind, which, through the confines of the stage, rediscovers individuality, private dignity and personal freedom, even under conditions of imprisonment.

“The film’s principal visual choice was to isolate the protagonists against an entirely black background, precisely to eliminate the sociological alibi. When we see a female inmate inside a grey cell, the audience looks for the source of guilt in the institution, the State or the environment. By removing reality and placing the women against a black background, every systemic justification disappears. All that remains is the individual, standing alone before her own story. I would describe this as an Enlightenment-inspired approach: human beings are fully responsible for their actions, for better or worse. The black background elevates their guilt from the realm of crime reporting to the universal dimension of classical tragedy, in which each person bears responsibility for her own ethical and aesthetic choices.”