Paola Cortellesi talks about Italy’s 1940s women’s rights drama “There’s Another Tomorrow” – Rome Film Festival

Feature film debut of the Italian actress and screenwriter Paola Cortellesi There is another tomorrow (C’è Ancora Domani) opened the 18th Rome Film Festival on Wednesday night.

The distinctive black and white work takes place in the run-up to the historic institutional referendum after the Second World War in Italy on June 2, 1946, in which women were allowed to vote for the first time. Feel yourself with modern music songs.

Cortellesi plays the main character Delia, a downtrodden Roman housewife ruled by her abusive husband (Valerio Mastandrea) and delinquent young sons, while doing odd jobs between cooking, cleaning and caring for her misogynistic, bedridden father-in-law.

In the background, she worries about what the future holds for her teenage daughter, who has fallen in love with a local boy with a possessive streak.

The film bids farewell to Cortellesi, a well-known name in Italy who is best known as a singer and comedian and has appeared in successful comedies such as: Do you know Claudia?, Piano, solo, Escort in love and this Like a cat on a highway Franchise.

Inspiration for There is another tomorrow came two years ago when Cortellesi read a children’s book to her young daughter that described the development of women’s rights.

“She was in disbelief at the stories of how women were treated in the past. At first I was relieved because I thought it was a sign that times had changed. Then I started thinking: If she doesn’t know about it, teenage girls probably don’t know about it either,” she says.

The actress, who has co-written a number of feature films, co-wrote with her longtime collaborators Furio Andreotti and Giulia Calenda a film that captured the reality of ordinary women in 1946 as they found themselves on the brink of crisis. their first democratic vote.

“What interested me was dealing with the everyday discrimination and domestic violence of that time,” she says. “It’s not about the great female figures like Nilde Lotti, I wanted to bring the forgotten women like my grandmother and great-grandmother into the spotlight.”

“It is not based on a true story but was inspired by her life and the many women like her, stories that were heard in court because everyone knew everything about everyone… there was not an iota of privacy. .. There is a generation of women who, with the exception of their lives, grew up without questioning the status quo.”

According to Cortellesi, it seemed a natural choice to shoot the film in black and white and also expressed her love for Neorealismo Rosa (pink neorealism).

“When my relatives told me stories from that period, I always imagined them in black and white… I also wanted to get in touch with a film school that I love, known as Neorealismo Rosa, which is different from Neorealismo Rome, open city or Bicycle thievesin the sense that the characters and settings are realistic, but the story contains elements of romance or comedy,” she explains.

Cortellesi spent three weeks rehearsing with her cast and conducting careful screen tests for the film’s various black-and-white tones before filming on location in the streets of Trastevere in Rome and on set at Cinecittà.

The actress points out that although the violence and discrimination against women depicted in the film seems to come from another era, it has not been eradicated from Italian society.

“Things have changed and we have made progress, but in some circles there is still a toxic mentality.” Femicide is still a problem in Italy. “According to a recent study, a woman is killed by a man every 72 hours, often by an ex who can’t do it unless they’ve left him,” she says.

The film is produced by Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Gangarossa at the Rome-based film and production company Wildside and Vision Distribution in Fremantle, a Sky company that is also the Italian distributor and handles international distribution.

Wildside produced a number of feature films in which Cortellesi starred and co-wrote the screenplay.

“One day Mario said to me: ‘Paola, I like the way you work and what you do, we should think about making a film together,'” says Cortellesi.

“My previous works that I’ve written and acted in are intelligent but more mainstream,” she continues. “When I presented this film to him and explained that it would be a black and white film about domestic violence that also made you laugh, I think he was surprised… but he was behind it, even though it was not an easy film . “to… He trusted me.”

Vision Distribution is releasing the film on October 26 in Italy.