From the Sardinian hinterland to the 1926 Nobel Prize in Literature: this is the story of Grazia Deledda, the only Italian writer to have received the prestigious award. The film Grazia, directed by Paola Columba , is dedicated to this figure who still has so much to offer today: "Not a traditional biopic," the author immediately clarifies, "but the coming-of-age story of a young woman and her redemption from patriarchal culture, in a late-nineteenth-century Sardinia brought to light like an antique, hand-woven trousseau."
It's the story of "a restless girl who feels suffocated, but who manages, with all her might, to turn her dream into a life project. A story of tenacity and courage, of self-awareness, a story from our past that speaks to today's girls," adds the director, who wrote Grazia with Fabio Segatori. The film is being released these days in Sardinia (Cagliari, Nuoro, Oristano), then in Rome, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Catania, Palermo, Messina, and other Italian cities, produced and distributed by Baby Films.
Already the author of the award-winning documentary Femminismo!, filmed a year before the MeToo movement broke out, Paola Columba recounts the youth of Grazia Deledda, shooting the film entirely in the places where the writer lived, in the hinterland of Sardinia, where time seems to have stood still.
Dozens of late-nineteenth-century costumes sewn based on the originals held in Rome's Museo delle Civiltà, over two thousand traditional peasant objects, and a late-nineteenth-century train that traveled through Sardinia specifically for the film's shoot: all elements of the meticulous attention to detail that went into this project. The protagonist, with an uncanny resemblance to the writer, is Barbara Pitzianti, an Italian talent trained abroad, discovered while working in theater in London.
Donatella Finocchiaro—who has appeared in films with Roberto Andò, Giuseppe Tornatore, and Marco Bellocchio—intensely portrays the mother, speaking in ancient Sardinian after only a month of preparation. Galatea Ranzi—who has appeared in theater with Luca Ronconi and in Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty—plays the proto-feminist Maria Manca, who welcomed the writer into her literary salon in Cagliari and sensed her future success.
Grazia Deledda has recently been in the news again, thanks to the release of the new edition of Fior di Sardegna, her first novel (published by Catartica Edizioni). Set in Nuoro in 1891, it is a surprising debut novel: an intense and sentimental story that, through an already highly personal style, offers a "veristic" glimpse of late-nineteenth-century Sardinia, with an unexpected and powerful narrative ending.
(Unioneonline)
