During the period that goes from 1945 to 1965, the filmmakers Lino Del Fra and Cecilia Mangini lived for three months in the Northern Vietnam during the USA war, in order to produce a documentary about the Vietnamese people. Now, two boxes full of 6x6 format photographic negative, forgotten inside an old closet for more than fifty years, have been found. The discovery has created a chamber movie that tells the story of a war, of a fading memory, and of a fight against time passing.
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A One-Woman Confessional: Eight Films by Cecilia Mangini is streaming for free until 22 March 2021 on Another Screen, a new, irregular streaming platform provided by the non-profit feminist film journal Another Gaze. Please consider supporting them.
Cecilia Mangini was a gifted artist, and a key figure in Italian documentary cinema, but like many other wayfarers her work has not been too widely seen. There is a potential remedy, as the feminist film journal Another Gaze have christened their new streaming service Another Screen with a freely and internationally available programme of her work.
Mangini was born in 1927 and died just a few weeks ago, in January 2021 at the age of 93. There are many ways of looking at and presenting her long life and diverse directorial output, which began in the late 1950s before stopping in the mid-1970s, when the flow of public funding for documentaries was dammed by the government â the latest in a line of attemp
Cecilia Mangini, Italian Documentary Cinema Pioneer, Dies at 93
Nick Vivarelli, provided by
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Pioneer Italian documentary director Cecilia Mangini, whose political works exploring hot-button topics such as youth contending with Italy’s postwar poverty, the condition of women, and the roots of fascism made her a legendary figure on the international film festival circuit, died on Jan. 21. She was 93.
Mangini made her mark from her very first work, 1958 feature “Ignoti alla città” (Unknown to the City), about kids in Rome’s slums, which was written by gay, leftist poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom Mangini subsequently collaborated on other docs.