Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence picked by First Hand Films ahead of Venice Premiere, details revealed 

Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence is gearing up to make its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival to draw attention to a filmmaker whose voice was all but lost to cinema history. Directed by Valerio Ciriaci, the documentary reconstructs the history, now lost or forgotten, of Elvira Notari, Italy’s first director to be a woman, working with painstaking use of archival documents, insights from scholars, and flashbacks.

Screening in the Venice Classics strand, Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence is both an act of preservation of history and a reactivation of a culture. With the inclusion of rarely shown footage drawn from the Cineteca Nazionale and the Cineteca di Bologna, and complemented with contemporary artistic elucidations, Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence introduces a forgotten pioneer. It emphasises why her contributions resonate today in contemporary discussions about women in cinema.

The significance of Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence in Venice Film Festival

Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence is produced in Naples by Antonella Di Nocera, with co-production by Isaak Liptzin and Ciriaci. Directed by Valerio Ciriaci, with cinematography by Liptzin and an original score by Silvia Cignoli, Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence is the result of years of research and creative partnership.

Speaking about the vision behind Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence, Di Nocera explained to Variety:

“From Naples to the world, Elvira’s legacy as a silent cinema pioneer carries an urgency born of everyday life, of voices once overlooked. This film is our way of restoring her to history and showing why her vision matters now.”

First Hand Films has secured world sales for Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence. The company’s chief, Esther van Messel, reflected on the acquisition by stating:

“A new and innovative way of celebrating women in the arts has us enthusiastically joining the fantastic team in place.”

Director Valerio Ciriaci described his journey to uncover Notari’s story, recalling how he discovered her while researching Italian cinema audiences in New York. He explained:

“Among the most requested films by the Italian-American community were silent Neapolitan productions, especially those from Dora Film, a small family-run company headed by Elvira Notari herself. Her films, with their direct language rooted in popular culture, held their own against the grand epics of the major production houses in Turin and Rome."

He went on to reflect on the scarcity of surviving material and the allure it added. He went on to explain,

“Paradoxically, it was enhanced by her elusiveness: just one surviving photograph, three extant films, and a handful of direct accounts. I was struck by how she had been sidelined, first by the Fascist regime that censored her films, then by official film histories that ignored her contributions, until scholars like Giuliana Bruno, Vittorio Martinelli, and Mario Franco began to revive her importance in the 1970s.”

The privilege of opening on one of the world’s most magnificent stages for artists, the documentary Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence ensures that Notari’s legacy travels well beyond its Italian origins.

Who was Elvira Notari? Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence rediscovers the life of a pioneer

Elvira Notari worked from 1906 until 1930, and she made more than 60 feature films, which brought the vibrancy of Neapolitan street life to the screen. Her plays appealed not just in Naples, but also in Italian-American communities in the United States, where they found validation in her portrayals of family, music, and melodrama.

But the emergence of fascist censorship, along with personal and professional woes, soon led her to retirement. Most of her films remained only in fragments at the time of her death, and her name had been nearly erased from official histories of the movies.

With Elvira’s legacy, a real community has grown, bound by a love for her work and a common act of rediscovery. Ciriaci emphasised how this obscurity became fertile ground for artistic revival. He explained how contemporary women artists have embraced Notari’s legacy through diverse forms of creative expression, from photography and fiction to music and embroidery workshops.

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“Around Elvira’s legacy, a true community has formed, united by a passion for her work and a shared act of rediscovery. From ghost at the margins of film history, she has re-emerged as a vibrant presence that transcends the silent era."

With this screening at the Venice Film Festival, Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence guarantees that one of the greatest trailblazers of cinema, one who just happened to be female, is returned to her rightful place in history, silenced no more but heard once more.

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