«Il valore della donna è il suo silenzio»

After the first blocks of film shootings and project presentations at festivals, I'm researching again. We are collecting different materials from television and cinema from various archives. Among other things, we are also working on old films by colleagues. I would like to share this research with you. From now on, I will send you a film recommendation each week. We will start with the excellent semi-documentary film by my colleague Gertrud Pinkus from the end of the 1970s: «Il Valore della donna è il suo Silenzio»:

About «ll valore della donna è il suo silenzio»:

The film is about a southern Italian emigrant in Frankfurt in the 1970s. The special thing about this film is its narrative form: it was planned as a documentary, but it soon turned out that none of the women wanted to go in front of the camera. Their fear of betraying their own family was too great. The law of the «omerta» also applies in emigration.

A southern Italian proverb says: "The greatest value of a girl is her beauty - the greatest value of a woman is her silence" That is why Maria M. tells her story only in audio. She herself remains anonymous. In the picture, other southern Italian immigrants portray Maria's story. But basically they play themselves and this gives the film its ambiguity and refreshing humour.

- Gertrud Pinkus

A film like its subject. It cannot be clearly defined or demarcated. It moves between colour and black and white, between feature film and documentary and between the North and the South. Gertrud Pinkus uses radical cinematic means to tell a gripping story about what migration means. And always stays very close to her protagonist.

- Samir