Ppersonal and passionate, tonight it airs at 9.30pm on Rai 3 Ninetta’s housefilm directed and starring Lina Sastri and based on his story of the same name. Set in a Naples where past and present are intertwined in memories, he says the relationship between a daughter and a mother suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Ninetta’s house: the plot of the film tonight 10 April on first TV on Rai 3
Set in Naples, the film tells a story that intertwines reality and imagination, past and presentmystery and magic. At the center of the plot is Ninetta (Angela Pagano), suffering from Alzheimer’s: one woman charismatic and full of memories that slowly become confused due to the illness.
One day, her daughter Lucia (Lina Sastri), a successful actress, returns to the Campania capital to visit the elderly woman who, in recent years, has been looked after affectionately by three ladies (Antonella Morea, Antonella Stefanucci, Franca Abbategiovanni), now more relatives than carers. Lucia’s visit is the occasion for a series of flashbacks, which recall memories and regrets. And also Ninetta’s illusions when she was a forty-year-old mother (Maria Pia Calzone), was forced to raise Lucia and her brother alone, due to the absence of her husband Alfonso (Massimo De Matteo) who was often in Brazil for work.
With delicacy and intensity, the inner world of a woman who lives between memory and oblivion transforms her home into a suspended placein which the city of Naples itself becomes the protagonist. Witness the memories and emotions that span generations. Meanwhile, for Lucia – woman with an unresolved life, after a difficult childhood – it will be an opportunity to clarify the relationship with the mother.
Maria Pia Calzone in a scene from “La casa di Ninetta”. (Rai Press Office)
An autobiographical family story, taken from the novel by Lina Sastri
For her first film as director, Lina Sastri he chose to adapt his novel of the same name published in 2009 from Guida Editori. A largely autobiographical book, and dedicated to his mother, where the narrative revolves around a community of women who share experiences, conflicts and affections.
Between dream and waking, Ninetta’s house ha a poetic and reflective rhythm: an act of love towards a special mother and woman, a fairy tale suspended between reality and imaginationand also a portrait of Naples, a living city, full of contradictions and far from stereotypes. Also adapted years ago into a theatrical monologue, it is a moving and successful film also because, just as it avoids Neapolitan folklore, it does not slip into sentimentality or in the nostalgia of a past that cannot return.
The cast, almost all female, of Ninetta’s house
Embellished with a cast full of great Neapolitan actressesthe film stars Lina Sastri in the co-protagonist role. The elderly mother Ninetta is played by the excellent Angela Paganofilm and TV actress active since the 1950s with Edoardo De Filippo and passed away in 2024 at the age of 87.
Also in the cast is Maria Pia Calzone who, at the press conference to present the film at Bif&st 2024, he said: “I did a very quick audition with Lina and I had crazy anxiety. For me it is very interesting to observe her and I put myself at the service of what she wanted. His mother is a woman who, despite not having had an easy life, has always had a high gaze towards the horizon and the sea. I tried to maintain these qualities.”
In the same press conference, Lina Sastri explained: «The film is about me, my mother, my family. But it is not a nostalgic film, rather it is a reflection on the present. A reflection on my Naples, on love, on jealousy, on betrayal and on forgiveness.”
