HIPPOPOETESS
Experimental Feature Film 53'
2018
Plump, stubborn, unconventional, ambitious, and impossible to contain, the hippopotamus poetess is one of us.
Hippopoetess is an experimental animation-based film inspired by the life of the American writer Amy Lowell and by her determination to assert herself in a world structured by male authority.
The film is a visual symphony that moves across documentary, performance, video art, and 3D animation, constructing a portrait that is at once poetic, ironic, tragic, and deeply affectionate. Amy Lowell fascinated me immediately: her physical presence, her ambition, her excess, her refusal of convention, her intrusiveness, her resourcefulness, her inability to remain in the place assigned to her, and the force with which she confronted the men of her time and defended her vision. She felt to me like a militant feminist long before the label could fully contain her.
In the film, I place myself in relation to her, to her experience of art, poetry, the body, love, and food, through a continuous play of mirrors in which I reflect myself in her and she reflects herself in me. Even our voices begin to overlap.
My own voice, in Italian, carrying the sound and rhythm of my cultural memory, meets Amy Lowell’s voice, returned to the present through the interpretation of an American actress. They merge, alternate, and hand themselves to one another in a form of tender sisterhood that crosses time.
Shows
MACRO Museum official premiere, Rome - 2018
Szczecin European Film Festival, Poland - 2018
Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece - 2018
Casa Internazionale delle Donne, Rome - 2018
RED Francesca Fini personal exhibition, Rome - 2018
CYBORG Fatale personal exhibition, Bologna - 2019
ARFF PARIS, Paris - 2019
Apollo 11, Rome - 2019
Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Belgrade - 2020
Credits
Screenplay, filming, animation, editing - Francesca Fini
Sound mix - Boris Riccardo D'Agostino
Media
PointBlank Magazine - open link
International Movie Database - open link
Book Ciak Magazine (Italian) review - open link
Video-recap by RAI Arte (Italian) - open link
Website of the project