Farewell to Cecilia Mangini, the great Italian documentary maker

“I have little time left, and that’s why I want to use it very well, I can’t waste it,” he said Cecilia Mangini in his latest interview with Republic in the midst of the pandemic. A few months after Mangini, the first Italian documentarian, dies in his home in Rome at 93, leaving an unbridgeable void in the world of cinema to which he has always dedicated his life. Among his first works we remember Unknown to the city in 1958, in which she availed herself of the collaboration of Pier Paolo Pasolini to comment on the Rome of the suburbs; The sings of the maranand 1961 ed Being women from 1965, a documentary of rare beauty that was for a long time the subject of discussion for having told the female condition of those years with ruthless crudeness.

Together with her husband Lino Del Fra, Cecilia Mangini talked about Italy that changes, that changes shape and changes structure. From To arms, we are fascists! from 1962 to Stendalì – They still play (1960), Mangini has always kept within himself the curiosity and the desire to tell the roots of the country, the belly of a nation to which many directors have preferred to close their eyes. After the work dedicated to his career released in 2010 by Davide Barletti and Lorenzo Conte (There was no lady at that table), aimed at making his works known to the new generations, Cecilia Mangini is back behind the camera 40 years after the last time to turn Traveling with Cecilia, a work, made together with Mariangela Barbanente, which contains with infinite clarity Cecilia-thought and her way of seeing the world.

Defined by many as “the rock woman of the doc”, a regular guest at many film festivals, Mangini has signed his latest film, Two forgotten boxes – Travel to Vietnam, in 2020 together with his faithful travel companion Paolo Pisanelli. To the film, built around the fortuitous discovery of some negatives found in two shoe boxes forgotten in a wardrobe and dating back to ’65 and ’66, a new project linked to the figure of Grazia Deledda would follow, set in Sardinia, always together with Pisanelli. The work, unfortunately, will never see the light, even if we are sure that it would have kept the clarity and revolution that have always been inherent in the spirit of Mangini.

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