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ROME 2016

Maria per Roma: An actress in search of a role

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- First-time director Karen Di Porto brings us an ironic and wishy-washy piece about the chaotic day of a young woman in the capital, between tourists, casting sessions and delusions

Maria per Roma: An actress in search of a role
Karen Di Porto in Maria per Roma

Women running around, chasing work and their passions, bending over backwards everyday to survive, stressed but with a smile on their face. After Sun, Heart, Love [+see also:
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, the 11th Rome Film Fest welcomes another Italian film that recounts the chaotic everyday life of a young woman. But whereas Daniele Vicari’s film is set in a working-class, suburbial context, Maria per Roma [+see also:
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by first-time director Karen Di Porto, which is being shown in the Official Selection, takes us into the centre of Rome, through the streets around Piazza Navona and into beautiful houses, between key drop-offs, theatre auditions, and parties at the Casa del Cinema. 

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Maria (played by the director herself) is a daughter of the middle-class that has slowly seen its dream of being rich slip away: the opulent 1980s have been over for some time, and her mother’s antiques shop is closing down. To make ends meet, she works as a key holder for a luxury holiday home agency: she greets tourists and gives them the keys. In the meantime, she nurtures her dream of being an actress. And so, perched on her scooter and accompanied by her dog with a heart condition (the two of them are inseparable), we see her running around from the early hours of the morning till late at night, always running late, from one front door to an audition, from an indie set on the banks of the Tiber to a check-in with incensed tourists, passing by the Colosseum (where a dear friend of hers, a failed actor, dresses up as Jesus for selfies) right up to an important audition, although the answer is still “we’ll let you know”. 

Without any real plot, the film, which has an autobiographical base (some liken its tone to that of Nanni Moretti’s first film, others to Eleonora Danco), moves gently between one situation and another, not without moments of entertainment created in particular by the strange needs of the tourists (there are those who ask her to keep them company, others who ask for bus tickets, and others who refuse to carry their bags because it is beneath them), whilst her trials and tribulations as an aspiring actress in search of a role are less engaging and more predictable. All this against the backdrop of a postcard-perfect Rome – Piazza Venezia, the Imperial Fora, Campo de’ Fiori – which the director does not however linger on: “I wanted to use it as a backdrop and not make it the protagonist”, explains Di Porto. “I always show it very fleetingly, because it is merely the stage on which the actors perform. It is a city full of problems, but one of extraordinary and refreshing beauty”.

Featuring unknown actors, mostly friends of the director, Maria per Roma (the title is a play on the Roman saying ‘looking for a Maria in Rome’, or rather something you’ll never find) contains an excess of self-references at times, but it shows us how with the crisis of recent years, even the wealthy have dropped down a rung on the social ladder: the nobility rent out their houses, the middle classes do their own cleaning… Perhaps most will be left indifferent, but it is nonetheless another point of view, which plenty of people will identify with.

Maria per Roma is produced by Galliano Juso for Bella Film. The photography is by Maura Morales (Onda su onda [+see also:
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First Light [+see also:
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interview: Vincenzo Marra
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), and the editing by Mirco Garrone (editor for Nanni Moretti, Carlo Mazzacurati and Daniele Luchetti, among others). Negotiations are still underway as to who will distribute the film.

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(Translated from Italian)

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