FFrancesca Comencini only finished yesterday filming the film about his father Luigi, Life first (with Fabrizio Gifuni). «The emotions are still circulating» he tells us. But emotions are on the surface even when we talk about Many faces in memorytheatrical show, written and directed by Comencini which «after having shot all over the place», is now a film. Which will be screened on October 28th at the Rome Film Festival and which will continue on tour, starting from the Cinema Giulio Cesare and the Nuovo cinema Aquila in Rome.
Six different women and a common story, that of the Via Rasella attack and the Fosse Ardeatine massacre: this is Many faces in memory. 335 men killed in retaliation after the attack on 23 March 1944 in which 33 German soldiers were killed.
«The project was born in 2015 and it was with the spirit of the relay, of the baton passed from hand to hand that many of us worked to transmit the words – powerful and important – of the 6 women protagonists, 6 survivors, 3 partisans and 3 relatives – daughters or wives of killed men » Comencini tells us I woman.
The actresses during the theater show.
Six protagonists of theater and cinema
Set design reduced to the bare bones, only six chairs per Ada Pignotti, Gabriella Polli, Vera Simoni, Carla Capponi, Marisa Musu, Lucia Ottombrini, interpreted by Lunetta Savino, Carlotta Natoli, Simonetta Solder, Chiara Tomarelli, Bianca Nappi and Mia Benedetta.
The six actresses on stage.
«The first relay starts from Alessandro Portelli, oral historian who for years has collected hundreds of audio testimonies of Roman men and women about the tragedy, testimonies which they then produced a book, The order has already been executed. Rome, the Fosse Ardeatine, memory. These testimonies, archived, are today preserved at the Gianni Bosio club and I, thanks to Mia Benedetta who introduced them to me, began to listen to them.”
«Oral history is a carnal, living history, suddenly you seem to live in a time in which you are together with the living and the dead, in a sort of eternal present because there is the voice of someone who tells you about their life, without any rhetoric, and you feel like you share their worries, to smell the smell of his cooking” continues Comencini. «Oral history has an aspect that lends itself to theatre, it is a story. So with these 6 militancy and passion actresses we started rehearsing.
Dramaturgy and rehearsals in the theater
The relay then changed hands. «I wrote the dramaturgy. I’ve been there days and nights, haunted by those voices trying to construct a choral story. I gave that text to the actresses and they toured with the show as much as they could – after the first performances I had to leave – they really took charge of it. They were in Regina Coeli, at the Chamber of Deputies, at the Fosse Ardeatine Memorial, in Milan at the Franco Parenti theatre. Until the show stopped. However, speaking about it with Lunetta Savino and Luca Bigazzi (director of photography, he collaborated with Comencini on numerous occasions and lit many of Paolo Sorrentino’s films, ed) we told ourselves we couldn’t let it go to waste.”
Francesca Comencini and Luca Bigazzi during filming.
«It comes from there the idea of shooting all in one day, as if all the planets had aligned on that day. The Ghione theater, a beautiful small theater in Rome, was available, all the actresses were free. So we threw ourselves into this miraculous day, where in the end everything was easy, given the madness. It wasn’t difficult for the actresses to find those women again, because they had never left them. For us it was a gamble. We felt guided by the spirit of that history which was alive and present for us. Luca, who didn’t know the show except through our stories, was moved – the strength of these women was so powerful.”
“Marginal” voices, women, survivors. «I think she was Carla Lonzi wrote: “We women have always been on the margins of history, let’s take advantage of it.” The testimony of those six voices is important beyond the history of that tragic event, because it speaks of the fight against Nazi-fascism, but it also contains the universal aspect of all wars and all fascisms. Throughout history, decisions have rarely been made by women, but then it was women who put together the pieces of lives destroyed by war and from violence. Their being on the margins is their great strength.”
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