Margot Sikabonyi: “A doctor in the family? I’d be right back”

When Margot Sikabonyi answers the phone, you immediately hear a lively background of laughter, alternating with the waves of the sea in the distance. With her in the house are her two children – Bruno (seven on May 22) and Leonardo (five just turned), with her partner Jacopo Lupi – and her mother and, between games and snacks, it is clear that they are having a lot of fun . It is for the children that she took a break from six years of acting and now the excitement is skyrocketing. In a positive sense, of course: in a few days, in fact, his film will be released Useless mouths.

The Roman actress, on the eve of her 40th birthday (she turns 40 next December 16), grapples with what she considers the greatest test of her career (which began when she was just eleven): the film-event, in theaters from 25 to 29 April on the occasion of the Remembrance Day, in fact, brings attention to the issue of deportation. In the story she plays Esther, a pregnant Jewish girl who is about to be transferred to a concentration camp. In a poignant portrait of denied femininity and women’s resistance, the former Maria of fiction A doctor in the family it redefines itself.

Margot Sikabonyi, a passionate wanderer (she lived almost everywhere, from Hong Kong to Hawaii), has decided to use the forced stop of the pandemic to rewrite her life. After publishing the book Breathe! She (Santelli publisher) she started working as a yoga teacher and in 2020 she returned to university to study psychology.

After a long period away from the set, what convinced you to come back?
“After I became a mother, I left everything and, apart from a pilot episode that I hope to produce in Canada (where I lived four years ago), this is the first project I felt like embracing. Director Claudio Uberti phoned me, proposed it to me and I felt ready to return ».

In what sense?
«Ester embodies the female situation, she seeks a light even in the dark, after strong crises. And this role was like a gift from God: on the one hand it scared me because it is a true story, but on the other I knew I could take responsibility for it ».

Do you think it is a necessary story in a time of war like ours?
“It is: this film is even more important in this period. Yet many programs and newspapers told me no, they did not want to hear about similar stories: they are wrong, right now that we live in similar situations we have to remember the past. And precisely on April 25, the day of the Liberation of Italy ».

As a mother, do you feel this theme more viscerally?
«Totalizing, I would say. When you become a mother, it is as if you were a daughter again, you are reborn in the light, you feel a sense of infinite responsibility from which you cannot escape. Do you think that this comes out in the film in a situation taken to the extreme and contradictory: in the concentration camp femininity is found despite all the attempts of the Nazis to reset it, cutting hair to zero and taking off women’s clothes, in short, it does not want to succumb . It is also valid today, in an age in which we are disintegrating, in a world increasingly divided between Evil and Good, in which one cannot even embrace ».