11/09/2009

In Venice Days documentary Girls, Life is Trembling, Paola Sangiovanni smartly weaves together archive material and interviews with four women in an examination of the Italian feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s. In particular, the violence that pervaded Italian society at that time – the clearest example being that until the mid-70s, rape was not considered a crime against a person, but against public morality.

In this social climate, women rose up, established legal clinics for rape victims, fought to legalize abortion, all the while demanding the same civil rights as men. Sangiovanni avoids rhetoric in her extensively researched documentary, allowing emotions and events to speak for themselves. The film culminates in the 1977 shooting of a Giorgiana Masi, a young student who was killed by police during a demonstration celebrating the third anniversary of the Italian divorce law.

That tragic event in many ways marked the end of numerous social movements, as more extreme factions of the left wing slid towards years of terrorism in Italy (the Red Brigades) that would in turn spark greater government repression.

Sangiovanni presented the film along with two of her subjects, journalist Marina Pivetta and actress Alessandra Vanzi. The director said she made the film because “memory is very much connected to identity, and it’s important to know our history in order understand the present.” All three agreed that, today, women’s rights and bodies continue to be violated, but in more subtle ways.

Vanzi also blamed drugs for disbanding and anesthetizing the various movements of those years, and that by the 1980s her friends thought her crazy for still believing in the ideals of the decade before. She added: “The fake hedonism that was intrinsically tied to drug culture, and the private television channels created in the 1980s that diffused horrible images of women, told women that buying and selling their bodies was freedom. But it’s a false freedom.”

Thus, Girls essentially comes full circle. The interviewees begin by relating their personal stories, which meld into the collective that was the feminist movement, and finish speaking about how women and men need to once again come together to combat the violence and numerous injustices that still exist today.

Girls, Life is Trembling was produced by Meta Film with Fake Factory for €250,000. It was finished just before the Venice Film Festival and producer Laura Cafiero says they are now beginning to search for an Italian distributor.