More Italian Girl Power from Laura Bispuri, Alba Rohrwacher, and rising star Sara Serraiocco!
She seems to have come out of nowhere, and before the Berlinale, you’d be hard pressed to find much about Laura Bispuri with a Google search. Within a few days all that has changed and the buzz about Laura and her first feature film, Vergine Giurata (Virgin) is all good.
Virgin, the story of girls and women in Albania’s patriarchal society who renounce their femininity and become sworn virgins, taking a vow of chastity and wearing male clothing in order to live as men. As men, they can take jobs (women can not), smoke, wear men’s clothes, drink alcohol, carry a gun, and be the head of the household. For some, it’s strictly a financial situation, but it’s also a way to avoid unwanted marriages, and probably a means of freedom for lesbians in a society with few rights for women.
Vergine Giurata is the story of Hana, played by Alba Rohrwacher, a farmer’s daughter who is tired of counting for nothing as a woman and makes the decision to become a sworn virgin and live as a man. When she visits a sister who has run away to Italy, she gets a taste of normal life and what it is like living in a society in which she is free to enjoy rights as a woman.
Those of you who loved the film Salvo, starring Saleh Bakri, Luigi Lo Cascio and Sara Serraiocco will want to pay attention to Sara, also at Berlin this year with Cloro (Chlorine), a tragic story about 17 year old Jenny (Serraiocco) who dreams of becoming a synchronized swimmer. When her mother dies Jenny is forced to move from her seacoast town to a mountain town in Abruzzi, the teenager is thrust into adulthood and must find a way to keep her own hopes and dreams alive.
Sara is one of those rising stars in Italian cinema – FOLLOW HER ON FACEBOOK
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