OFELIA NON ANNEGA (OPHELIA DID NOT DROWN)
Experimental Feature Film 90'
2016
This is a performance-based art film: a layered cinematic work built through collage, hybridization, and friction between distant visual worlds. The film combines historical archival footage selected from the archive of Istituto Luce Cinecittà with original performance actions I conceived in dialogue with that repertoire.
It brings together heterogeneous and seemingly incompatible materials, held together by a broader question: what does the avant-garde mean today, for an artist who inhabits it as a daily practice, and how was that idea once constructed, represented, and institutionalized by Istituto Luce, guardian of the sacred and secular imagery of Italian history since 1927?
The film moves through body art, transformation, unsettling living tableaux, visionary costumes, and images that oscillate between seduction and disturbance. At its center is an Ophelia unlike the one handed down by literary tradition: not a fragile adolescent condemned to disappear, but a plurality of women of different ages, bodies, and features. A contemporary, bittersweet Ophelia who ultimately refuses to drown, rejecting the role of romantic victim in order to become simply a person.
The work stages a confrontation between past and present, permanence and ephemerality. On one side, the historical imagery preserved by Istituto Luce, with its anthropological documentaries, surreal fragments, and cinematic propaganda, all marked by a desire to monumentalize reality. On the other, performance art, which by its very nature exposes the contingent, unstable, and vulnerable dimension of human experience.
Through what I think of as an ancestral feminism, the film decontextualizes and destabilizes the archival material, stripping it of its original ideological certainty and opening it to other bodies, other voices, and other possible meanings.
Shows
MACRO Museum official premiere, Rome - 2016
Bob Wilson’s Watermill Center New York - 2016
Videoformes Festival, Clermont-Ferrand - 2016
Apollo 11, Roma - 2016
Fabbrica del Vedere, Venice, curated by Carlo Montanaro - 2016
Los Angeles Cine Fest, LA - 2016
Ivahm Festival, Madrid - 2017
MACRO Museum for Fuorinorma, Rome - 2017
Proyector Festival, Madrid - 2017
Teatro dei Dioscuri, Roma - 2017
Teatro di Tor Bella Monaca, Roma - 2017
Casa del Cinema, Sala KODAK, Roma - 2017
Apollo 11, Roma - 2017
Bikaner House, New Delhi, curated by Istituto Italiano di Cultura - 2017
Over The Real Festival, Viareggio - 2017
Fonlad Festival Coimbra - 2017
RED Francesca Fini personal exhibition, Rome - 2018
David Lynch’s Silencio Club, Paris - 2019
Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Belgrade - 2020
Credits
Screenplay, directing, editing - Francesca Fini
Performing - Giulio Bianchini, Daniela Cavallini, Marzia De Maria, Sylvia Di Ianni, Francesca Fini, Marco Fioramanti, Alessia Latorre, Letizia Lucchini, Alessandro Parise, Simona Sorbello, Inanna Trillis, Ilaria Campiglia, Chiara Catalano, Marilena Di Prospero, Ivan Macera, Nunzia Picciallo, Daniele Sirotti, Dario Spampinato.
Photography - Roberto De Amicis, Marco Federici
Media
International Movie Database - open link
Directed By Women review - open link
Review by Bruno Di Marino (Italian) - open link
Website of the project