FRANCESCA FINI

This is a performance-based art film, a layered and multifaceted cinematic experience, a work made of collaged hybridizations. The film was made by combining historical archival footage, selected from the film Archive collected by Istituto Luce Cinecittà, and original performance art pieces that I conceived inspired by the repertoire itself. The film moves between provocative body-art and body-manipulation scenes, visually engaging ideas and mesmerizing scenarios and costumes, disturbing living installations, and the celebration of feminine beauty and strength. At the center of the story is an Ophelia who is different from the one-handed down by the literary tradition: not a shy and fragile teenager, but many women of different colors, features, and ages. A modern and bittersweet Ophelia. An Ophelia who in the end does not drown, rejecting her destiny as a romantic heroine to become a "normal person."

Plump, stubborn, unconventional, offbeat, ambitious, unstoppable: the hippopotamus poetess is one of us! Hippopoetess is an experimental animation-based film that tells the story of the American writer Amy Lowell and her desire to succeed in a world dominated by men. A visual symphony that mixes the languages of the documentary, performance, video art, and 3d animation, to give back, with an absolutely experimental and poetic style, sometimes tragic and sometimes comic, the story of this interesting figure. With her fatness, her ambition, her intrusiveness, her resourcefulness, her contempt for conventions, her boisterous and stubborn character, her inability to “remain in her place”, her braveness in dealing with the men of her times and assert her ideas, I immediately fell in love with Amy, a militant feminist without knowing she was one.

This is a sixty-minute experimental film that I wrote and directed in Jerusalem in May 2016, upon invitation of the New Media Department of Musrara Art School. The film is a performance-based production made of symbolic actions staged around the city, with the participation of local artists and performers, while visually strong imagery and guerrilla-like actions involved the community in a game of provocations on the theme of identity and belonging.