Glory!
by Margherita Vicario is an all-female and slightly Martian musical film.
In the running for Italy at the Berlinale, where it was greeted with over 10 minutes of applause, and in theaters from 11 April with 01, it is set in a girls' boarding school in Venice at the end of the 18th century.
Here Teresa (Galatea Bellugi), a young woman with visionary talent, together with a small group of extraordinary musicians directed by a problematic priest (Paolo Rossi), secretly cultivate a completely modern, rebellious, pop music, a thousand miles away from the dominant baroque.
Fresh allegory of an art and an era in which women counted for little and also redemption, always feminine, compared to the thousand abuses suffered.
"There have always been women musicians, very creatively free, who you found either in the courts or in the colleges, or in any case in protected places - says the director, singer-songwriter and actress in Berlin -. Talented women who preferred to become a nun in order to continue playing. Since they were the last, sometimes their surnames were the same as their instruments. I imagined that they could also perform very modern songs that no one would be able to hear. In short, I could make them play what I wanted without being denied."
In the film written by Anita Rivaroli and Vicario, the cast features Carlotta Gamba, Veronica Lucchesi (La Representative di Lista), Elio (delle Storie tese), Natalino Balasso, Anita Kravos, Vincenzo Crea and Paolo Rossi in the role of a bizarre priest (who could remember Vivaldi), but full of resentment for his creative sterility.
"Playing a bad priest came quite easily to me - says Paolo Rossi -. Comedians enjoy dealing with the dark side of life. For example, clowns play with violence only to exorcise it. My fate is strange - he concludes - I started working in the parish, where I did my first performance, but then I found myself in Lotta Continua".
And again Vicario - granddaughter of the actor and director Marco Vicario and of the actress Rossana Podestà and also the daughter of the director Francesco Vicario - on her directorial debut: "It has always been my dream. I was an actress first, then a singer-songwriter and with these two legs I found myself a director. And then - she adds - even my favorite directors are women, I'm talking about directors like Valerie Donzelli or Valeria Bruni Tedeschi".
He then underlines: "I come from music and I was always asked what I think of women in music today. So I began to study female composers from the 16th to the 20th century who were all little known and so I made a fictional film to justice of those about whom nothing is known".
Finally, Veronica Lucchesi (Lista Representative) says: "This film arrived at the right time. It is difficult today to be heard in the musical environment and I was also disappointed with the narration of the music of other colleagues, always the same, I felt like a beautiful figurine and if you're not in that environment you disappear completely."
Glory!
is a tempest production with Rai Cinema and tellfilm (Switzerland).
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