City of women - today
It was during a rainy afternoon in my Berlin's apartment that the idea of this film was born.
Indulgently swimming in nostalgia for Italy, that afternoon I watched again, after years, Fellini's movie “City of women”. Fellini is not only a cinematographic but also a cultural reference to me. He grew up in the same Italian region I come from, the facts from his childhood he describes in some of his movies are the same memories from the town of Rimini, my grandpa was used to talk to me about. So every time I'm homesick, I watch his movies. I was enjoying Mastroianni's train trip to an unknown female town ad his first steps in this bizarre universe of women when I scene caught my attention: hundreds of women sit together, sing very special slogans, like: “All women are beautiful! All women are young! I love my rides and don't fear my age! All women are twenty!”. I stopped the DVD-player. The movie opened theaters 1981 – how could the perception that Italian women have of themselves change so much in only thirty years? Obsessed by the fear of aging, convinced that they can only be successful, if they are perceived as sexy and with a ready at any time attitude: that's how, especially young women seem to perceive themselves, even when they have management positions and are very successful. This is also the image of women in the media world outside of Italy and this ideal is pursued by an entire fashion and beauty industry. Housewives, students, judges, models, one looks like the other, orientated on the ideals of the media world, robbed of their uniqueness.
I felt the urgency to understand what happened and decided therefore to undertake a new trip to an imaginary city of women, as Mastroianni did thirty years before.
I traveled through Italy and met women with very different biographies an backgrounds but a common and very strong connection to the female body – like a very special a prostitute,who was before a Latin and ancient Greek teacher, a feminist gynecologist, who worked as an extra in Fellini's “City of women”, a dancer involved in Berlusconi's party world and the editor in chief of the Italian Vogue, to end with the most intimate meeting of all: the one with the women of my family, who, since four generations, always and only conceive and give birth to baby girls...
City of women – today is the story of this trip.