Cecilia Mangini

My Travels with Cecilia

Lievito madre – Le ragazze del secolo scorso

Juste wanders the streets of Paris looking for people only he can see. He collects their last memory before helping them into the afterlife. One day Agathe, a young woman, recognizes him. She belongs to his previous life. She is alive and he is a ghost. How will they manage to love each other and seize this second chance?

Before becoming a film critic, then a maker mainly of sharply engaged documentaries, usually in tandem with her late husband Lino Del Fra, Cécilia Mangini was a photographer. Taking pictures was something she did all her life, alongside whatever else she was working on. In 1965 Mangini and Del Fra went to war-torn Vietnam to make a film they never finished. More than half a century later, she returned to these images, moving and still, some of which she found again by accident.

In 1962 Cecilia Mangini, an Italian filmmaker made 'Stendali', a documentary about a group of women who practiced an Ancient Greek funeral rite in the southern Italian town of Martano (Puglia, Lecce). Shortly after the filming of 'Stendali' the women died out, with no one to replace them, the rites disappeared, leaving the town in its silence. In 2011, 50 years later, the film 'Moroloja' looks back upon the site of the funeral, revisiting the town of Martano, revealing that some of the women are still alive. Narration by Cecilia Mangini.

"Il mondo a scatti" is a film that intertwines images of today and yesterday, still images and moving images through a dialogue between two people who reflect on the visible and invisible things of the world: Cecilia Mangini, unstoppable ninety years old, photographer, documentary maker, screenwriter is filmed by Paolo Pisanelli, photographer, director, curator of cultural events.

The story of Cecilia Mangini, documentary maker, photographer and intellectual who told thirty years of Italy's history with her films.