Donne di Mafia / Mafia Women
Mini film festival.
16-17 March 2024.
The Mini Film Festival Donne di mafia, having a voice, returns for its fourth year at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London on 16 - 17 March 2024.
The Festival focuses on the role, presence, and agency of women in Italian mafias, which was part of a research project funded by a Leverhulme Major Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust https://shorturl.at/rvEIZ
Women in Italian mafias are often portrayed as helpless victims, ignorant by-standers, or passive protagonists. However, new research in the field emphasises their more complex existence within the criminal underworld, showing how ‘women are an integral part of these [crime] groups with their own agency and their own criminal knowledge and capacity for violence’. Mafias, like other organised crime groups, need women to survive and flourish. Behind the mafia male brand, women are crucial as partners-in-crime and without them, it is unclear if mafias would survive. As one former mafia woman once explained ‘there are many women […], there are many types of women […], there are women who want to play the part of men’ (Allum, 2016). Organised crime and Italian mafias are more female than we want to think or accept: è femmina.
Organised by CinemaItaliaUK https://www.cinemaitaliauk.co.uk/ and sponsored by the University of Bath, Donne di mafia will take place at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith London https://riversidestudios.co.uk/ on 16 - 17 March 2024. This year the festival will also take place in Bath on 23 - 24 April 2024 at the Royal Bath Literary and Scientific institution https://www.brlsi.org/.
London
Saturday March 16, 2024: 4pm-9pm
Sunday March 17, 2024: 4pm-9pm
The festival programme will include four feature films, addressing the question of women in different contexts: 1950s Naples and Campania, 2020s Foggiano, 2010s Calabria - Milano and contemporary Naples. All screenings will be accompanied by experts’ panels to introduce and discuss the films. Among the speakers there will be film director Francesco Munzi, journalists Clare Longrigg and Giorgia Scaturro, academics Gaetana Marrone, Isabella Clough Marinaro, and Veronica Vergna.
PROGRAM
Saturday 16 March 2024
BLACK SOULS
The story of three brothers, the sons of shepherds, with ties to the ‘ndrangheta’, the local branch of the Mafia – and their divided souls.
Luigi, the youngest, is an international drug dealer. Rocco, Milanese by adoption, is to all appearances a middle-class businessman. Luciano, the eldest, harbours a pathological fantasy of pre-industrial Calabria and engages in lonely, melancholy dialogue with the dead. His twenty-year-old son Leo belongs to the lost generation, who have no identity. The only thing Leo has inherited from his ancestors is resentment and for him, the future is a train that has already left the station.
After a trivial argument, he carries out an act of intimidation against a bar protected by a rival clan. Is this simple youthful foolishness and how does it tie dimensions between the distant past and modern life together? Film in Italian with English subtitles.
4pm– 6.10pm: Black Souls (Anime Nere) by Francesco Munzi (110 min)
6.20pm - 7.05pm : Q & A + Panel 1
7.25pm - 9pm: To Be Confirmed
9.10pm – 9.45pm: Q & A + Panel 2
Sunday 17 March 2024
BURNING HEARTS
In it, the forbidden love between Andrea, the reluctant heir of the Malatesta family, and Marilena, the beautiful wife of the Camporeale boss, rekindles an old feud between two rival families. The fatal passion brings the clans back into war, in an ancient land, not so different from the far west, where only blood can wash out blood, following the ruthless codes of the local mafia. But Marilena, now cast out by the Camporeale and prisoner of the Malatesta, contended and reviled, with the strength only a wounded mother can have, will oppose a destiny which seems already written. All films in Italian with English subtitles.
NEVIA
Nevia is 17 and lives in the suburbs of Naples with her beloved little sister Enza, their aunt Lucia and their grandmother Nanà. Nevia is a stubborn teenager, determined to get from life much more than fate has planned for her, but it’s hard to be a girl in a place where only men can make the rules and apparently there are no options but to make ends meet with little illegal jobs. Until one day, a circus comes to town, changing everything in Nevia’s life and giving her a new hope… don’t miss! Film in Italian with English subtitles.
4pm - 6.15pm: Burning Hearts (Ti mangio il cuore) by Pippo Mezzapesa (120 mins)
6.25pm - 7.10pm: Q & A + Panel 3
7.30pm - 9pm: Nevia by Nunzia De Stefano (86 mins)
9pm - 9.30pm: Q&A